Wednesday, April 08, 2009

Birds of the Equinox and My Personal 100

Birds of the Equinox

Several days ago I participated in Birdstack's community event to take note of birds during the spring equinox. I didn't really see many birds that day, but if you click the photo above, you'll see some reports of what we all saw along with a couple of cool bird photos and one evidence-of-bird photo.

Birdstack helps you to keep track of all the different species you've seen (called a 'life list') so I'm here to tell you that my list is up to 100. That sounds impressive until you realize that there are at least 10,000 different kinds of birds worldwide (in other words, 100 is pathetic!). Also, I'll readily admit that I might not really have identified all those 100 birds perfectly, because I'm strictly an untrained amateur. But I have fun trying.

Speaking of having fun, today I stopped off at the local duck park and immediately regretted not bringing my camera with me. There was a great egret that seemed quite tame even though lots of people were around. I saw it spear a rather large fish, maybe 6-8 inches long, and swallow it. I'm not sure, but I think it got stuck in the egret's throat for about 5 minutes. The bird just stood there with a big, uncomfortable looking bulge in its long and skinny throat.

Then as I walked around the tiny lake I saw a mama mallard with 15 miniature ducklings swimming at the mucky end of the lake away from everybody else.

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