South Georgia Island is a surviving fragment from the breakup of the Gondwana supercontinent. Located in the far South Atlantic Ocean, at latitude 54° South, about 1,200 miles east of the tip of South America, it’s a long ways from anywhere, but it’s absolutely worth the effort and expense of getting there. The western side…
It’s that time of the year again, when the the birds do what they do despite record-high temperatures, drought, habitat loss and human disturbance: raise their young. And while there are worrisome signs things are not good, WC has been able to find a few young birds that seem to be getting by. Here’s a…
John Baumgartner was a gold miner with three proven-up claims along the South Fork of the Boise River, about nine miles east of Featherville, Idaho. Unusually for a gold miner, Baumgartner in 1935 deeded his claims to the United States for a park. He retained a life estate and lived there until his death in…
WC was recently asked what was the rarest bird he had photographed. That’s hard to say; so little is known about so many New World species that it’s hard to know what species are rare, let alone the rarest. But a candidate, certainly, would be the Jocotoco Antpitta.1 WC has written about this species before,…
Cottonwood Creek is one of the ephemeral streams that drain the westerly slopes of the Boise Front, flowing out behind the state capitol. Like all of those ephemeral streams, it is a deeply carved, steep-sided valley in lake bed sediments of vanished Lake Idaho. It’s mostly sagebrush, with a narrow ribbon of riparian habitat along…
Every birder and bird photographer has a favorite spot, their “patch.” The place they go to because it’s their favorite. WC’s favorite patch – at least in Idaho – is Camas Prairie/Centennial Marsh.1 In the spring, before things start to dry up, it’s a pretty special place. All of the photos in this post were…
Did you know there is a species of Asian babbler – the only babbler species in the New World – found solely on the western edge of North America? Neither did WC. Wrentits are a member of the family of birds called Sylviidae. The family includes the Old World sylviid warblers, parrotbills and their allied…
A few bird photos from May 2, 2021. The photos are from two areas just south of Coos Bay: Sunset Bay State Park and South Slough Marine Estuary. None of these photos are going to win any prizes, but WC promises you that they were immense fun to take. Processing them on WC’s somewhat aged…
As David James Duncan observed in his classic The River Why, all those Oregon coastal rivers that come rushing and hurrying down out of the Coast Range slow to a crawl in meanders and bends when they get near the ocean. James claimed that viewed from the right angle, from the right hilltop, one river…
The William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge in the central Willamette Valley was established in 1964 to protect the wintering habitat of the Dusky Canada Goose. But to do so it also protects some of the remaining pieces of the native habitat. And those natural habitats attract an impressive number of bird species. WC and…
WC and Mrs. WC had a chance to spend a few days in Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. The spring songbirds weren’t there yet, but pretty much everyone else was and the birding was excellent. Photos were taken. Here’s a sampler (please click on an image to see a larger version): WC will have a more…
Banbury Hot Springs is in the middle Snake River Canyon, right along the Snake River. After you’ve soaked yourself to a limp noodle, you can go down to the river’s edge in the late afternoon twilight and photograph birds returning to roost for the evening. It’s a pretty good show. A part of the large…
There’s nothing loonie about loons. They are a beautiful genus of birds, handsome, skilled diving hunters and devoted parents. WC has been lucky enough to photograph all five species of the genus Gavia, although most of the photos are nothing WC would want to hang on his wall. Among other challenges, they are extremely wary…
We looked at the Golden-olive Woodpecker back in early January. Despite the similarity in name, overall coloration and range, the two “golden” woodpeckers are members of different genera. Eastern Panama, where these photos were taken, is at the northern limit of this species’ range. It’s more commonly found in the northern half of South America,…
Park pond waterfowl, for your viewing pleasure. In this case, Albertson Park, a portion of the river park system in Boise. All of these photos were taken from the same spot, along the new pond-side walkway late last week. Getting detail in the blacks and the white is challenging, especially in bright sunlight. WC is…
A close cousin to last week’s Yellow-tufted Woodpecker, the Acorn Woodpecker illustrates well the difference in the level of knowledge between North American and Neotropical bird species. The Acorn Woodpecker, which ranges from southern Oregon to the northern mountains of Columbia, has been thoroughly studied, in sharp contrast to its cousin. The Acorn Woodpecker, across…
We’re a dozen or so species into the woodpeckers, here at Wickersham’s Conscience. It’s probably about time to talk about the family Picidae, the woodpeckers generally. Birds of the World (paywalled) states: Woodpeckers have diversified into every treed habitat on Earth except for Madagascar and Australasia (east of Wallace’s line), and ground-living woodpeckers even occur…
WC has posted a lot of political posts lately. While discussion of those issues is important, it can also bring even more stress to readers’ already stress-filled days. So, subject to the Magpie Principle, WC will endeavor to focus a little more on nature, birds and nature photography the next few weeks, to “depressurize” from…
WC’s house was graced with visit by an adult male Anna’s Hummingbird on February 15. A lovely visitor in all that snow and rain. Which helps inspire this post. Anna’s Hummingbird has experienced an impressive range expansion over the last century. The species once nested only along the Pacific slope of northern Baja California and…
WC plans to explore the Heron family, the Herons, Egrets and Bitterns, in the Return of Bird of the Week series, if we ever finish up the Woodpeckers. In the meantime, here’s a teaser, looking at a half a dozen of the thirty-seven or so species of Neotropic Herons. A crepuscular (late twilight and pre-dawn…
There’s a place just a few hours drive from Boise where the old magic still works. You want to get there on an early spring morning while it’s still dark. Park, stay in your vehicle, but roll the windows down. It will be cold in the pre-dawn darkness, but the reward is hearing that strange…
Okay, technically these are the Odontophoridae (New World quail) and Phasianidae (the pheasant family), but basically they are chicken-like birds of the order Galliformes. They are described by wildlife management authorities as Upland Game Birds, but WC, like many birders, refuses to classify birds by whether or not they are hunted. In the Intermountain West,…
The Hairy Woodpecker is one of the most widely distributed and most highly variable bird species in North America. Found from the south slopes of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska to the mountains of Panama, it’s familiar to anyone who has hung up a suet feeder. But in the woods, it’s fairly rare to…
Not all woodpeckers are black and white with a touch of red. The handsome Lewis’s Woodpecker features iridescent green, red and gray, as well as black. Lewis’s Woodpecker is from the same family, but a different genus, as last week’s Black-backed Woodpecker. It ranges from southern British Columbia south to Arizona and New Mexico, across…
This is the third entry in a sometimes series of birds WC photographed in 2020. This post focuses on raptors, an imprecise term for mostly eagles, hawks and falcons. It’s a lifestyle, not a Linnaean classifiction. In fact, hawks and falcons turn out to not be closely related, despite a shared hunting lifestyle. Of course,…
This is the second entry in a sometime series of birds photographed in 2020. This post focuses on Rallidae, the family of birds that includes Rails, Coots and Gallinules. It’s a family of birds with some 159 species, that range from incredibly hard to see, let alone photograph – the Black Rail comes to mind…
Ornithologists called the Black-backed Woodpecker “enigmatic” and the term is apt. It’s a bit of a specialist, inhabiting by preference damaged forests. Historically, in Alaska it was found reliably in recent forest fire burns, but with the increased numbers and extent of wildfires, it seems to be more dispersed now. It also prefers forests invaded…
We have exhausted WC’s even marginally decent photos of Cracids – the Chachalacas, Curassows and Guans. So we’ll shift to woodpeckers, the Piciformes, and start with North America’s largest surviving woodpecker, the Pileated. In the late 1990s, WC was flyfishing for steelhead trout along the Situk River, in southeastern Alaska, near Yakutat. One early foggy…
As you might suspect, WC finds birds and bird photography a refuge from the dumpster fire that is current events. For WC’s own peace of mind, if not yours as well, Wickersham’s Conscience will feature bird photo posts irregularly through the balance of the year. Some of these images may have appeared earlier this year.…
Last week we looked at the Rufous-headed Chachalaca. This week we go to the other end of the bird for the critical field mark. Mrs. WC thinks it’s unseemly to name a bird after its naughty bits, but there it is. These photos are more than fourteen years old, taken with an Olympus E-1, Olympus’s…
Wickersham's Conscience 
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