The Orange-crowned Warbler is an unusually drab wood warbler, found in breeding season across Canada and Alaska and in the intermountain west. It’s a comparatively short-distance migrant, wintering in the southern third of the Lower 48 and Mexico. This species is dusky olive-green above, with brighter yellow on its rump and upper-tail coverts, grayer on…
A reader recently asked WC what WC thought of “Photoshopping”. By the question, WC assumes the reader means using Adobe Photoshop to create fake or misleading photos, to digitally alter them in dishonest ways. Photoshop is a tool. It’s a powerful suite of software algorithms to enhance digital images. It’s likely accurate to say that…
This post is dedicated to the late Dr. Vera Alexander, marine scientist, equestrian, musician, philanthropist and much more. It was WC’s privilege to serve as a marine technician on the R/V Acona in 1967 on a cruise where Dr. Alexander, a newly minted PhD, did some of the original research on the relationship between Harbor…
A reader recently asked how birds with extraordinarily long bills could possibly get the food from the end of their bill into their throats. WC can offer an insight. One of the North American bird species with a long bill is the aptly named Long-billed Curlew. It has a body length of body length 500–650…
WC and Mrs. WC visited Summer Lake Wild Life Refuge this spring instead of its bigger, better known federal cousin, Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. But our route back took us too close to Malheur not to spend a few hours in the Refuge. While the birds, especially at the headquarters, weren’t especially cooperative, the species…
This species has a special place in WC’s heart: not only is it beautiful; it was the logo bird for the late, lamented Alaska Bird Observatory, appearing on everything from coffee mugs to stickers to t-shirts. In Interior and Southcentral Alaska, it is associated with stands of mature white spruce. That preference seems more closely…
WC has written about the amazing geology of Summer Lake, and promised photos of the birds that migrate through and breed in the area. Here’s that bird photo sampler. Please don’t call them “seagulls.” This handsome fellow was more than 200 miles from the nearest seawater. All the rails, including Virginia Rail, are famously difficult…
All but the most recent readers here at Wickersham’s Conscience know WC has been struggling for more than two years to answer a reader’s simple question, “How many bird species have you photographed?” It turned out to be much more tedious and complicated to answer than you have patience to read. Busted software, vast numbers…
There’s no getting round it; this is a remarkable warbler. No wood warbler is more different in breeding and non-breeding plumage. It has the longest trans-oceanic flight of any warbler, from 2,500 to 3,500 km and is estimated to take up to 88 hours to complete the trip. It is the most southerly migrating of…
White-throated Sparrow, until 2023, was kind of a nemesis bird for WC. A nemesis bird is one that, on the. evidence and experience, doesn’t want you to see or photograph it. For example, there was one reported at Hull’s Gulch, a city park half a mile from WC’s house. Despite a dozen trips there to…
If last week’s Black-throated Green Warbler is an eastern bird, this week’s Wilson Warbler is a cross-continental bird, a species which between breeding range, migration and winter range covers all of North America except the Florida peninsula. A brushy habitat specialist, WC has seen it in the northern foothills of the Brooks Range in Alaska…
In 2005, on a birding trip to Trinidad, WC met two extraordinary birders, two pharmacists from St. Louis, Missouri. We got along well and, as things turned out, over the next 18 years we have made a dozen or more birding trips together. They were along on WC’s and Mrs. WC’s recent trip to the…
As WC has recently written, this spring included a trip to the Dry Tortugas, the westerly end of the coral ridge that includes the better known Key West. Of course, to get to the Dry Tortugas you have to go to Florida, currently governed – for a loose definition of “governed” – by the reprehensible…
WC has exhausted his usable Alcid photos, and probably his readers’ patience with pictures of seabirds as well. So we’ll move on to a new family of birds, the Parulidae, the Wood Warblers. There are about 115 species of Wood Warblers, about half of them occurring in North America. WC only has photos of a…
The Dry Tortugas, a set of small coral islets dominated by Fort Jefferson, is a hot, arid and storm-ridden location. But it is also home to four species of birds that breed nowhere else in the continental United States. WC, on his recent trip to the national park, was fortunate to see and photograph all…
Dry Tortugas, the site of Fort Jefferson and a national park, is famous among birders because it supports breeding colonies of Brown Noddies and Sooty Terns, and is also an important stop for songbirds migrating across the Gulf of Mexico. The Gulf crossing is an exhausting business for small birds and Dry Tortugas is a…
WC’s friend Milo Burcham says that if you approach 100 or different Marbled Murrelets, one of them is pretty likely to cooperate for close photos. Maybe so, but you couldn’t prove it by WC. On board The Auklet out of Cordova back in 2012, we attempted the trick on a couple of dozen different birds,…
Back in 2018, WC noted that there were many, many species of bird named for “Swainson” and asked why. This post visits another ornithologist with the same question. Wilson’s Warbler. Wilson’s Snipe. Wilson’s Phalarope. Wilson’s Plover. Wilson’s Storm Petrel. There are at least seven bird species named after “Wilson,” and another half dozen whose scientific…
There are three species of Guillemots; WC has decent photos of only one, the Pigeon Guillemot. WC’s photos of Black Guillemot, like his photos of Dovekie, are, at best, documentary. Even the Pigeon Guillemot photos are a little sketchy. Pigeon Guillemot occupy a distinctly different ecological niche than their other alcid cousins. These are in-shore,…
WC has written about the Bruneau Sand Dunes before. This year it was the destination for WC’s and Mrs. WC’s shakedown trip. Because it’s better to discover problems with your RV reasonablyclose to home. So we spent a couple of mid-April nights at the very nice Idaho state park there. Now any geomorphologist looking at…
The Common Murre, despite recent dramatic die offs, remains the most, er. . . common Alcid. There’s an estimated 16.6 million Common Murres, spread across the cooler, continental shelf waters of the sub-Arctic and low-Arctic. It is still one of the most numerous marine birds in the Northern Hemisphere. Because of the impact of oil…
WC was lucky enough to find a pair of Yellow-rumped Warblers hawking a hatch of insects at the ponds in Kathryn Albertson Park last week. It was cold, breezy and overcast, with mostly gloomy light, but that wasn’t stopping the Yellow-rumpeds from chasing their meal. Here are five images intended to cheer up WC’s readers…
There are more auklet species; WC just doesn’t have photos of them, so they won’t appear in RoBotW. Instead, we’ll move on to another genus of Alcids, the Murres. The largest Alcid that has survived contact with humanity is this week’s Bird of the Week, the Thick-billed Murre.1 The Thick-billed Murre is about 17 inches…
If you are a serious photographer, you’ve spent some time at DP Review. Love it or hate it, trust it or distrust it, DPReview has for more than 20 years been the best on-line source for reviews and recommendations of all things photographic. Camera and lens reviews, side-by-side comparisons, recommendations by intended use, price and…
A while back – actually, a considerable while back – a couple of readers asked what the weirdest bird was that WC had photographed. “Weird” is pretty subjective. So subjective that WC has dragged his feet in responding. But here are a few birds that WC, for one reason or another, WC regards as weird.…
The Brits use the term “confiding” to describe a bird or bird species that is more approachable than most. In WC’s admittedly small experience, the Rhinoceros Auklet is the most approachable alcid. Aboard the auspiciously named R/V Auklet, piloted By the delightful David Lanka (since retired), we were able to approach with 10 feet of…
They really should be called “Tiny Auklets.” at about 5.25 inches long, they are much less than half the size of their cousins, although they make up in attitude for what they may lack in size. Here’s a photo with a Tufted Puffin, Parakeet Auklet and Least Auklet that gives you an idea of the…
Another alcid and, if anything, even cuter than last week’s Parakeet Auklet. With that crest and sometimes silly postures, the Crested Auklet is almost guaranteed to make you smile. It’s also delightful in a way that’s unique among the thousands of bird species WC has seen. But we’ll get to that in a minute. This…
In addition to the Rosy-finches and Barn Owl WC has posted earlier, WC and Mrs. WC saw a very nice selection of other Idaho winter birds in south-central Idaho. Because you can never have too many bird photos, here’s a handful of the species we saw that WC was able to photograph. While there are…
The Hagerman Formation, a layer of sand and silt compressed to fragile sedimentary rock, is part of the larger Idaho Group. It’s world famous as the source of the Hagerman fossils. A large piece of the Formation is preserved as the Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, which has produced thousands of fossils across more than…
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