Thoughtful Thursday: Karma
The Freiday Bird Blog
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2y ago
  [This female Black Widow was in my house at the edge of the Pine Barrens. I released her outside. Karma is everything.]"Never wound what you can’t kill." -Spider-Man.     ..read more
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Thoughtful Thursday: Linus and Charlie Brown
The Freiday Bird Blog
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2y ago
[Linus and Charlie Brown live under the shed at my new digs. I often relate to their namesakes' conversations at the brick wall, like the one below.]     ..read more
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Thoughtful Thursday: Speed
The Freiday Bird Blog
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3y ago
  [Click play for video, wait for the audio, including the sound of snail footsteps. . . ] Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. ― Lao Tzu ..read more
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Glass and Snow
The Freiday Bird Blog
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3y ago
[Snowy Egret with "glass" eel, Forsythe NWR, NJ April, 2021. The red facial skin is a trait of high breeding plumage for the egret, but the eel is the real story. Click to enlarge.] Egrets are gorgeous, but the silver shimmer in this Snowy Egret's bill is another miracle of nature. Egrets eat fish, and American eels are fish, but what a fish they are. Eels flip the famous anadromous lifestyle of salmon on its head. They are catadromous, growing up in freshwater and returning to the sea to spawn. This glass ribbon hatched from egg to a larvae in the Sargasso Sea. Now where the hek is that? I'l ..read more
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Thoughtful Thursday: The Sky on Their Backs
The Freiday Bird Blog
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3y ago
"In the midst of the poplar that stands by our door, we planted a bluebird box. . . ". . . And we hoped before the summer was o'er A transient pair to coax. One warm summer's day the bluebirds came And lighted on our tree, But at first the wand'rers were not so tame But they were afraid of me. They seemed to come from the distant south, Just over the Walden wood, And they skimmed it along with open mouth Close by where the bellows stood. Warbling they swept round the distant cliff, And they warbled it over the lea, And over the blacksmith's shop in a jiff Did they come warbling to me. Th ..read more
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Twenty-four Ways to tell Sharp-shinned Hawks and Cooper's Hawks Apart
The Freiday Bird Blog
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3y ago
[Above and below: one's a Sharp-shinned Hawk, the other a Cooper's Hawk. Not necessarily to scale; few photos are, and also consider how different lighting conditions, bird postures and photo processing might have affected the photos. Use the chart the below to figure out which is which. I confess I didn't pick slam-dunk photos, but these are still readily i.d.'d. Both Cape May, NJ in fall. Click to enlarge.] This is FAR from a new i.d. challenge. Back in the early 1980’s, when I first became involved in “organized” birding, it was very, very common for people to just let these i.d.’s go as ..read more
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Fri-D: How To Tell Perched Falcons From Other Raptors By Shape
The Freiday Bird Blog
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3y ago
This week I rode by a sodden, rainy day Peregrine Falcon perched grumpily near the Cape May, NJ ferry terminal, and the child within me laughed. Perched falcons are broad-shouldered, broad and full chested thanks to powerful flying muscles, with small heads. They look attenuated at the rear thanks to the narrow waist and long wings. Most have powerful feet. After 36 years teaching about birds, this gobbledy-junk feels bloody boring. But children of the 1970's,  you have seen this shape before. Bird like a kid now and then.     ..read more
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Thoughtful Thursday: What Do They Want?
The Freiday Bird Blog
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3y ago
“But that's not love, he thought, that's not what she wants, nor what any of them want, they do not want you to find yourself in them, they want instead that you should lose yourself in them. And yet, he thought, they are always trying to find themselves in you.” ― James Jones, From Here to Eternity   ..read more
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Connecting the Dots
The Freiday Bird Blog
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3y ago
[Satellite image, United States and adjoining countries, about 5:30 a.m. Wednesday, December 23, 2020. Click to enlarge.] Ever wonder why you can't see the stars? Ever wonder why there are few bears and essentially no bobcats in southern New Jersey? Ever wonder why timber wolves and mountain lions will never again come to the east coast? Connect the dots. In the northeast/mid-Atlantic, the bright line goes from top right (northeast) to bottom left (southwest). Like this: Boston. New York City/Newark/Jersey City. Trenton/Philadelphia. Baltimore/Washington, D.C. People, that's us seen from spa ..read more
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Of Sapsuckers, Lemonade, Observing Birds, and the Perfect Gift
The Freiday Bird Blog
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3y ago
[Immature Yellow-bellied Sapsucker with Poison Ivy berries, Del Haven, NJ Wednesday, December 16, 2020.] I've bemoaned to a couple friends that we've reached a point in the year where I could do my eBird checklist before going out to visit my local patch (roughly Cox Hall Creek north to Green Creek and from Delaware Bay to about a mile inland, Cape May County, NJ), and it would be within a bird or two of being spot on. This is as much a product of having birded this patch or at least a portion of it nearly daily all this pandemic year, save some not so fun trips to the hospital. Make lemons ..read more
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