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End of Year Eye Candy

Here are a few of my favorite bird pix from the first half of 2008.Wishing you and yours a happy, healthy, prosperous, peaceful new year.Diademed tanager from Brazil—maybe my fave bird I got to photograph during 2008.Chukar in Utah—my only North American lifer in 2008.Atlantic puffin, Hog Island, Maine in June.Male blue dacnis, Brazil in July.Male Baltimore oriole, South Padre Island, Texas in April.Male Cape May warbler, South Padre Island, Texas,......

According to my sources, fluent in Portuguese, this sign says "Milk from the foot of the cow."In Brazil, while driving along any main highway, you might chance upon a roadside restaurant and store called Vaca Preta, which translates from the Portuguese meaning Black Cow. What makes the Black Cow different from, say a Steak-N-Shake in the United States, or a Happy Eater in the United Kingdom is that the Black Cow has a cow (not always black) in a......

Cold this Boxing DayWrapping paper smoke billowsAlmond burr oak ......

Happy Christmas, Merry Holidays to alland Peace on Earth.love,B......

Dear All:Last April, due to a problem with the FTP servers at Blogger, I was forced to find a new home for Bill of the Birds. I was unable to post via FTP (file transfer protocol) so that I could host my blog on the Bird Watcher's Digest site. So I moved over to Blogspot. Well, we could never really figure out what the problem was, but, as with many things in the digital realm, it now seems, mysteriously, to be resolved (actual digits of fingers......

My birding pal Terry Moore and I found these paper towels in a roadside store in Brazil last summer. We couldn't resist taking a photo and I tried to ask the store owner if they had the same brand, but in toilet paper. He did not really understand what I was saying (my Portuguese being on-existent) or why we were laughing ourselves silly over some stupid paper towels.Birding in foreign lands is fabulous. But even better are some of the funny product......

Northern cardinal male. We have one less of these on the farm this morning.First thing this morning, while I was talking on the telephone with a hick buddy from West Virginny, the death rocket came blasting past the studio window.This was a big female sharp-shinned hawk and she swooped up into feet-forward position to grab a male northern cardinal. Her piercing talons must have killed the redbird instantly because he hung limp as she pumped her wings......

I am inviting all Bill of the Birds readers to write a funny caption for this photograph. I took this image in November on a birding field trip to The King Ranch in southern Texas.Please submit your entry via the Comments posting option below. I will select a winner on Friday, December 19, 2008. Employees of BWD and members of my immediate family are only eligible if they submit their captions in person, written in Sharpie on the back of a $50 bill.The......

An adult female yellow-bellied sapsucker showed up at the peanut feeder today. Zick had noticed that the peanut consumption was way up and the peanuts in the feeder were way down, and wondered why—even going so far as to wonder specifically about a sapsucker.I think she may have even conjured this bird. It's been years since we've had a sapsucker at the feeders regularly. I'm hoping this gal stays for a spell. We've got lots of peanuts on hand—she......

Bat falcon, Flores, Guatemala. March 3, 2008.Am I jinxing myself by looking back at some of the year's most enjoyable birding moments before the year is even complete? I certainly hope not.*One of the highlights from early 2008 was my birthday bat falcon in Flores, Guatemala. The bat falcon is a fairly common raptor in the tropics. In fact it was something of a sore point for me that I had not seen one after more than half a dozen trips to its range......

Perhaps this is a sign that birding or bird watching has finally come of age. We're starting to see films being made about our hobby. And, the good news is, these films do not star Miss Jane Hathaway, Professor Pith-Helmet, or that crotchety old lady ornithologist from The Birds.Enter: Opposable Chums: Guts & Glory at the World Series of Birding.Filmmaker Jason Kessler is a successful videographer from New York. Although he has made other documentary......

Photo by Julie Zickefoose.As the end of another year draws nigh, I am beset and bemused by thoughts of the year's highlights. One of the first highlights to come to mind for 2008—and for many of the past six years for that matter—was my annual ride on the Pale Playground Pig of the Prairie.Located in a small lakeside playground not far from Carrington, North Dakota, the pig is one of those timeless kids' rides: a cartoonish animal attached to a giant......

Snowflake at the suet dough in February 2008.Some of you might remember my posts last winter about Snowflake the leucistic adult female dark-eyed junco who was a winterlong visitor in our yard.Well, Snowflake did not show up in October, when the first returning juncos did. And now, it's December and we've got at least 30 dark-eyed juncos scattered around the various feeders and fields—but all of them have normal-looking plumage.Which makes me wonder......

In March of 1964, I was a two-year old kid sitting in a highchair at the window of my grandma Thompson's kitchen. It was a snowy morning on the farm and the feeders were mobbed with birds. This is the moment I called out my fist bird ID (according to Grandma Thompson)."Junco!" I said, pointing out the window at the bird feeder. Gram swore that was my exact word—practically my first one! Of course it was not until 1968 or so that I met my spark bird.If......

One Spot: 24 Hours of GameCam

I put the Moultrie GameCam out by the inedible pear tree last Saturday night, November 29, 2008. In front of the camera I scattered inedible pears from said tree and some cracked corn.I let the camera grab images for the next couple of days but the most activity occurred on November 29th, coincidentally the night all the food was put out.The video slide show I put together captures the sheer volume of action that happens at a food source at night, while we humans are sleeping. We can occupy these same spaces during the daylight hours, completely oblivious to what went on in that exact spot the......

Shotgun season for deer hunting started at dawn yesterday. Here in the boonies of southeastern Ohio that means woodlands dotted with blaze orange and a regular tattoo of gunshots throughout the day. Our part of the state swells in population with the addition of thousands of hunters coming down to Ohio's most deer-rich corner. We have huge chunks of Wayne National Forest here as well as big parcels of state game land, recovered strip mine acreage,......

Blue jay, dark-eyed junco, northern cardinal on a snowy afternoon.In winter, when we feed suet dough to our backyard birds, we often see a number of hungry individuals waiting for their turn to eat. I did not realize this fully until I started taking pictures of the suet dough visitors on our back deck railing. This series of images, like many other similar shots I've shared here recently, was taken with a Wingscapes BirdCam.I think it's pretty interesting......

Yesterday was Thanksgiving—the only national American holiday where we all have license to stuff ourselves until we explode. I did. Did you?Interestingly the birds at the suet dough station were following suit. Especially the blue jays.Blue jays are creatures of boom and bust. When they find food in abundance, they load up as much as they can in their large, expandable throat pouches, and take it away to cache. This is a hedge against leaner times......

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End of Year Eye Candy

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