Birding and Bird Photography

Shitty picture, but this is one of our hunting buddies birds. If I put up all the pics I had on falcons and hawks, I'd freeze up my tablet

 

Shitty picture, but this is one of our hunting buddies birds. If I put up all the pics I had on falcons and hawks, I'd freeze up my tablet

 

My dads first bird, Breezy, a red tailed hawk

And his first tiercel goshawk

Burrowing owls are my friend over the summer

And another tiercel hybrid

 

Good pic! Eurasian collared dove, quite a pest just like starlings.

 

Good weekend at my back yard/woods. Saw a Pileated Woodpecker and a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker.

 

A collared dove? I hate the sound they make, it sounds like a scratching sound..... Mourning doves sound pretty though

 

Mocking birds on the other hand...kill them all.

 

Passage Red tailed hawk

 

That's weird, when I quoted it it says sharp shinned?

 

Without seeing it with my eyes I can't say for size. I would put money on Passage(Under 1 year old) immature plummage red tailed hawk. A n immature red tailed does not have a red tail which a lot of people confuse. The white large "spot" on its upper breast is also correspondent to a Passage red tail...

Any accipiter will have an unproportinately long tail and that hawk has more of a buteo style of body

 

Ha! Wait 'till you have to go off of the shape of two tail feathers... (Allen's vs. Rufous hummingbirds, look up the descriptions. Sibley says they are virtually identical in the field)
I'm just giving you a hard time. They are similar, but that collar is extremely distinctive for eurasian collared dove. When you see your next mourning dove you'll probably agree.

I agree. The key identifier for Red-tails is the black patagial mark (between the wrist and the head on the leading edge of the wing). No other light hawk has that distinctive mark. On hawks with dark wings (dark morphs, for example), obviously that area is dark anyways, so you have to go on other clues, but generally speaking check for the patagial mark for red-tailed hawks.

And I don't know what is going on with that second image you posted from Google, but the smaller bird in the picture is the sharpie but the larger bird is definitely a red-tail, NOT a red-shoulder. BE CAREFUL with google image searches. People don't always ID the birds named in the picture correctly. Do your best to go off the guide if you can.

Here's a red-shouldered hawk, for comparison:

 

a lady my wife works with took this photo, See has some really nice photo's

 

What he said.

You will start noticing a HUGE flight difference between Buteos and Accipiters too

 

Goddamn, I keep seeing and hearing the cedar waxwings around campus and flying over my apartment but for some reason they're not really stopping by the trees outside.

And I don't remember if your ID was ever checked on that last one. Looks like a northern flicker to me. It's definitely a flicker, and the northern one is the only one that occurs up in the Northern states. To confirm, did you see any red on the underside of the wings as it flew?

Edit: just re-checked the guide on different flickers. Northern Flickers have the sharp black crescent patch while Gilded Flickers have a more oval black patch on their breast. Aside from that, the Gilded Flicker range map shows it pretty much only in the Sonoran desert. Red malar stripe is indicative of the Flickers. You've probably also heard the call, it's pretty unique. I can't find any youtube videos of the call I'm thinking of, but it's this really loud, piercing KREE.

Speaking of woodpecker species, this is a really cool video. I've seen it a few times before, but I really like it!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_2VrLINP3Y

 

Did you get a view of the tail on that accipiter (genus for the first photo)? The two that it could be are Cooper's and Sharp-shinned, but it's definitely an accipiter. I agree with you based on breast and size of the head because sharpies have a smaller head relative to the body than cooper's. It's tough to tell the actual size of the body in the picture, how big are those sticks?
If you saw the tail, you'd see either a squared-off tail end, indicating sharp-shinned, or a rounded tail end, indicating cooper's.

Nice one on the two different waxwings! I didn't even know there were two...now I want to see one of the bohemian ones! There is a tree with berries outside but for some reason they aren't flocking to it like they have in the past.

Look up Townsend's Solitaire in your guide. I think that's the one you can't ID, but I could be wrong.

 

I'd go with Townsend's Solitaire. The wing color pattern, eye ring, overall gray color, kinda short bill, and range map are all right for it.

Hmmmm...Yeah can't tell the tail on that one, but it looks smaller now, so yeah I'd go with sharp-shinned, too.
Nice birds!

 

Today on my deck (so far):

Varied Thrush
2 Bewicks Wrens
Northern Flicker
male Anna's Hummingbird
American Robin
European Starlings
multiple sparrow species
Steller's Jay
Black-capped Chickadees
Chestnut-backed Chickadees
troupe of Bushtits
Dark-eyed Juncos
House Finches
Pine Siskin

Also another small bird, brown with yellow wingbars and (usually retracted and not visible) yellow crest/tuft on head. Seems bigger than golden-crowned kinglet, and colors very muted, but that seems to be the only thing that fits the yellow on the head


Phone doesnt provide clear/close enough images. Will try to find camera.

 

Interesting but not surprising how many pictures of eagles are in this thread already. If anyone would like to shoot pictures of both Bald and Golden Eagles in CONUS some of both winter along the upper Mississippi River even though it is frozen solid now. Although in the winters it can be a bit brutal weather wise. The National Eagle Center in Wabasha, Mn. is worth a visit if you happen to be in the area, which happens to be half an hour NE of me. There are quite a few in the summer of course with a lot more different bird species available then and even more in the spring and fall. Benjamin Franklin wanted the Wild Turkey instead of the Eagle as the national symbol for the US. Glad he didn't win that one myself, they are often outside my living room window. Nasty cell phone camera picture:



Almost ready to pull the trigger on a decent camera and a couple of lenses. To say this isn't a cheap hobby is an understatement. When I first started looking at lenses for birding I was shocked. Now some of the same prices have me going hey that isn't a bad price...

 

Nice list for a backyard! I'm jealous of all you guys up north with the Chickadees.
Definitely post up a picture of that other guy if you can. I have no idea what it could be other than a golden-crowned kinglet.

I just listed all of the birds I remember seeing/hearing since the beginning of this year and I'm up to 63 species, 14 of which I added on Wednesday during a class field trip out to the Yolo Bypass wildlife area
Gotta look at the pictures I took on that trip...