I had planned to have a couple of posts pop up in this past week and was working towards some nice little presentations, but many things happened to prevent this and I simply did not have my shit together even slightly, thus the post title.
Foremost in there was something in recognition of World Migratory Bird Day, specifically some video, but I was having a devil of a time getting a decent audio recording, largely due to the utter racket of the cicadas right now; I do have decent recordings of those, however, and they sound like this:
Brood XIX, 13-year cicadas in 2024
Amongst all this were issues with recorders and auto-level effects that I did not want, microphones that were inadequate for the job, a ridiculous amount of traffic on the road not far enough away, and so on.
But while I was out getting the first audio clip, late last week, I started tracking a distant, repeated call that was intriguing, and eventually drew quite close to it, helped considerably by its repetition over a period of several minutes – that’s practically unheard of for bird calls.
Always the same ol’ song
I didn’t fully recognize the calls, though I recognized the producer once I spotted it – the pitch seemed quite different from what I’d encountered before, and the repetition seemed atypical as well, but I could clearly see the bird’s head bobbing during the calls, so there’s no question that it was this guy:
That’s a red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus,) in adult plumage to boot, so not a young one asking for food or anything – it’s too early in the year for that anyway. I would have combined the audio with video, except that I didn’t have the tripod with me and you really don’t want to see video shot at 600mm handheld.
But on World Migratory Bird Day itself, I was out checking the status of some osprey (Pandion haliaetus) nests, on the odd chance that someone had hatched. For the first, I shot a little video – nothing elaborate, but hey, I was making the effort, right?
Bear in mind that I was using the shotgun microphone aimed directly at the nests, which greatly reduced the ambient noise off-axis, as well as reducing the audio track in the mix afterwards – it was noisy as hell, is what I’m trying to say, but that’s Saturday morning for you. And yes, I was shooting east in the morning, hardly the time to be doing so, but it was when I was available to do so. I’ll be checking back a little later on, when it’s a sunny afternoon (it’s been raining all day as I type this.)
We’ll have some still photos from that session as well.
This is the closer one – 75 meters, maybe? I have no way to measure it with any degree of accuracy.
Cropped a lot tighter for this one, since it was at least three times farther off – it won’t provide any decent photos unless I’m there right as the young are learning to fly, but it’s in the same area, able to be seen with just a slight turn of the tripod head, so I take the opportunity while there.
And this is the mate of the one immediately above, not too far away from the nest and simply hanging out. As I said in the video, this will change soon enough, and he’ll get a lot busier.
These were in a marshy stump field a little ways from Jordan Lake, but then I went to a location on the lake itself to do more checking. I could see nothing regarding the nest there, since it was harshly backlit and at a much greater distance, but then a shadow crossed me as something passed in front of the sun, and I looked up to find this one:
I wasn’t watching anywhere close to the sun, since I like not being blind, so I would have missed this one had it not conveniently thrown some shade. By the way, this is full frame, not cropped at all – my little friend here was close.
The bay where I was is half-shrouded by trees, so losing sight of any given bird takes place often, but given the time frame, I’m reasonably certain that the same one reappeared a few minutes later and was half-heartedly hunting some distance off, backing suddenly as it spotted something below, but then resuming its casual circling as it decided the prey wasn’t viable.
This looks like it’s descending for prey, but it never dove as I watched – just paused and semi-hovered in midair, watching the water, the moved on again.
Much later on and further around the lakeshore, I heard some osprey calls pretty close by and one hove into view almost directly overhead, which I have determined is about the worst place for me to get decent pics – I just can’t crane backwards with the long lens and keep the camera steady enough. But as it passed and I could adopt a more natural pose, I snagged some acceptable frames.
There remains the possibility that this is the exact same one, since it appeared from the direction that the previous had disappeared towards, but there are enough osprey at the lake that this is hardly conclusive. I could immediately see that the osprey was being followed, but I didn’t make out by what – it initially looked like a crow, though I immediately raised the camera to my eye and was concentrating on snagging the closer bird instead. And the reason that it was being chased was clear enough; someone believed that the bullhead should be shared.
As the osprey was getting further off I switched to the pursuer, which didn’t help much at all, given that I was seeing it from directly behind and still largely backlit.
Even as a still photo enlarged far beyond what could be seen in the viewfinder, this is pretty inconclusive, though some hints remain, and I do have to say that the pursuer was flapping as rapidly as a crow, even when I’ve never seen a crow attempting to chase an osprey (and we have plenty of them around here, believe me.) But as the pursuer turned more broadside, I got a couple of frames that were good enough for identification.
That’s definitely a bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus,) almost certainly second year, and I believe this was about the time that the eagle realized that it wasn’t going to catch up with the osprey. Given a little altitude, eagles can dive and pick up a lot of speed, but down near the water in level flight, they’re slower and far less agile than osprey. I did not at all get the impression of how big the bird was, like four times the size of a crow, but I admit to not really focusing on it until this point.
Also, eagles are not really migratory, so they don’t count for the holiday, and I shouldn’t even have been wasting frames on them at all. Which includes the pair that were higher overhead while this was going on, apparently also trying to keep tabs on the osprey.
These both have white heads, but the tails aren’t as distinctively white and the upper one still shows mottling beneath the wings, so I’m going to call both of these four-year-olds, just transitioning into adult coloration. There had been no sign of any of these until the osprey appeared with the fish, and I wonder where they’d been hanging out – it could easily have been hundreds of meters away and the pursuit had been going on for longer than I suspected.
And that’s all that I ended up getting for the holiday, but if you’ll excuse me, the rain appears to have stopped and I might have the opportunity to snag what I couldn’t on the weekend. Stay tuned…