Among birders’ favorite hummingbirds has to be the Violet-bellied. Not only is the male’s coloration spectacular; this species favors the flowers of the understory, making it more accessible than most hummingbirds. And it is sometimes attracted to feeders. It’s a handsome bird from this angle, but when it catches the light right, well. It can…
The last two days, WC’s backyard has been filled with Western Tanagers. This is not normal. There have been as many as 20-25 birds present at one time. It’s a treat to see these brilliantly colored birds, of course. It would be more of a treat if it weren’t raining most of the time under…
WC isn’t a serious lister. A serious lister is a birder who focuses – maybe over-focuses – on the lists of birds seen. But WC does keep a life list. Recently, doing a bit of research on the family of birds called Rallidae WC discovered that the Clapper Rail had been split into three species:…
WC has written about Sora before, and the difficulties of photographing them. Sora are rails, a clade of birds that are famously secretive. Sora are probably the most widely distributed of the North American rails. You hear them much, much more often than you see them. The Sora takes its name from one of its…
There are eight species of Brilliants; WC has photos of four of them. If anything, this species iseven more territorial and belligerent than its Fawn-breasted cousin. This male is making a threat display against a rival or another hummingbird. WC has more than two dozen photos of this hummingbird reacting in this way. So, yeah,…
WC mentioned that he saw an astonishing number of Lewis’s Woodpeckers on his last road trip. One bird was especially memorable as it struggled with a series of pressing problems in front of a bemused WC and Mrs. WC. The bird had found or maybe excavated a nice-looking cavity in a Ponderosa Pine snag. Lewis’s…
It’s not a prairie; it’s another victim of Idahoans’ tendency to name any modest-sized, nearly flat spot a “prairie.” In fact, Prairie is in the middle of Smith’s Prairie, a volcanic caldera, the same caldera that is believed to have produced the basalt flows that dammed the South Fork of the Boise River. The “prairie”…
