bigsam's Favorites

A very unusual and Kool small bird on the barbed wire fence along the West side of N Staten Island Road.

A partially leucistic male House Finch; the eyes appeared to be dark colored rather than pinkish. I was only able to get one good photo before the small flock of male House Finches flew further out into the field and landed in the green grass where I couldn't find the white-headed male again. We all agreed in our vehicle that this was the Bird-of-the-Day for this location (Staten Island).

Dark morph. Saw it soaked and washed up, so I gently carried it to dry sand. Watched it for hours and it appeared very weak. After the sun set I decided to take the little guy to a local rescue. Hopefully there, the dude can regain strength.

It's probably not HPAI, and it's likely something like starvation, or plastic intake. Hopefully the little guy will be able to get fattened up at the rescue and rereleased soon.

The culmination of my hiking and birding efforts in SoCal in June 1974 was the discovery of a nesting pair of Spotted Owls in Trabuco Canyon. A day after the initial discovery, I invited raptor bander Pete Bloom to accompany me back to the spot to attempt to band the birds. Pete was successful at capturing and banding both adults and the single fledgling. Here is some documentation of that effort, including a John Denver-ish image of me at the time with the fledgling and Pete Bloom holding one of the adults. I also include an image of the canyon as it looked that day where Pete set up the small trap to capture the owls.

Plant not cushion-forming; flowers white; inflorescence axis glabrous (mostly); hairs on basal leaves 8–12-rayed on abaxial surface. From large population which is mostly on limestone/marble, with some plants on adjacent red metamorphics (like this one!).

This marten was likely up at 10,900ft/3300m to hunt pikas, but when I stumbled along it became very curious about me. I was able to snap photos for about 8 minutes, then moved on to photograph the flock of rosy finches that was half dosing off while observing the marten. I wasn't able to observe any predation, but may have heard a couple distant screams.

This is very likely Elegant Tern. BTW- I uploaded this as 4K curious to see if Ultra High Resolution makes recognition easier for the AI. Nah! I guess learning does. There is probably not a really high bar for resolution - Other than for the humans who do the ID. I did this picture because I think I have the top view of the wings of this individual as well...A reference of sorts.

The first time I had ever seen this, i videoed the entire event as well from entry to exit. It was as if this species swims all the time. I sent it to a frogmouth expert and she had never seen that before. The bird chose to swim and flew away very easily after its swim. There appeared to be no explanation for the bird swimming as it was not particularly hot or anything unusual.