Feeling cooped up by winter weather? Tired of staring at four walls?
Put on your hat and coat and take a walk outside. Even though it’s cold, nature has beauty on display.
Take a look outdoors. … Then you can reward yourself with hot chocolate.
(photo of a Japanese larch cone at John J. Tyler Arboretum in Media, Pennsylvania. Click on the image to see this Featured Picture on Wikimedia Commons.)
Each year Steve Gosser compiles his favorite bird photos in a chronological video. Here are his favorites from 2014.
If you’ve been following my blog you’ll recognize some of these birds as my favorites, too. (Peregrine fans, check time-codes 1:57 and 2:22. Bald eagle fans you’ll find even more to love.)
Thanks to Steve for sharing his gorgeous photos. They’ll make you want to go out birding right now!
(photos and video by Steve Gosser. Click here to visit his photo site.)
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At this time of year “The Nutcracker” brings to mind Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker ballet, a Christmastime tradition in the U.S.
But in my bird-oriented brain I thought of this bird when I saw “Nutcracker” on a marquee.
Clark’s nutcracker is a member of the Corvid (crow) family that lives in the Rockies and mountainous West. He’s famous for caching nuts for the winter and remembering where all of them are stashed. He was named for William Clark of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
I have never seen a Clark’s nutcracker.
Maybe I will in 2015…
(photo by Stephen Pavlov from Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license. Click on the image to see the original)
18 December 2014
Throw Back Thursday: (TBT)
This tiny bird practically walks on water.
Read more about him and the unusual lifestyles of his parents in this blog post from 2011: Walks On Water
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)
12 December 2014
This beautiful YouTube video shows a family of Eleonora’s falcons (Falco eleonorae) at their summer home in Sardinia.
Eleonora’s falcon is an Old World hobby(*) falcon that winters in Madagascar and nests on barren islands in the Mediterranean. It was named for Eleanor of Arborea, national heroine of Sardinia, who in 1392 became the first ruler in history to protect hawk and falcon nests against illegal hunters.
Eleanor began rulling Arborea, a sovereign state in west-central Sardinia, in a moment of crisis in 1383. The Crown of Aragon based in Barcelona had conquered all of Sardinia except Arborea and succession to the Arborean throne was shaken by the murder of Hugh III. Eleanor’s infant son Frederick was next in line to the throne so she rushed to Arborea and became Regent Judge at age 36. In the first four years of her reign she united the Sardinians in a war against Aragon and won back nearly all of the island.
Eleanor’s greatest legacy was the Carta de Logu, the laws she promulgated in 1395. Advanced for its time the laws were a uniform code of justice, publicly available, that set most criminal penalties as fines instead of imprisonment or death and preserved the property rights of women. The Carta de Logu was so good that it lasted for four centuries until Charles Felix, a military King of Sardinia, suspended it in 1827.
Wikipedia explains how Eleanor advanced the rights of women through the legal code:
One notable provision of the Code is that it gave daughters and sons the same inheritance rights. As well, it also declared that rape could be recompensed through marriage only if the woman who was raped agreed to marry her rapist, and even if she did the Code declared that the rapist still had to either pay a large fine to the Senate or have his foot cut off (his choice). If she did not agree to marry him, he had to give her a dowry that suited her social status, so that she could marry someone else, and he still had to either pay a large fine to the Senate or have his foot cut off (his choice).
— Wikipedia: Eleanor of Arborea
Click on the screenshot above to see a video of the falcon that bears Eleanor’s name. The Falco della Regina is “The Falcon of the Queen.”
p.s. (*) Hobbies are smaller than peregrines, larger than American kestrels, and were often used by falconers to hunt birds. “Hobby” does not mean amateur pastime. Instead this word comes from Old French, probably derived from Middle Dutch “hobeler” which means to turn or roll.
(video posted on YouTube by santonagriva)
If our eyes could look deep into space we’d see the clouds in this stellar nursery in the Centaurus constellation, 6,500 light years away.
This pink glowing nebula and clouds of dust were photographed by the European Southern Observatory (ESO) at Cerro Paranal, Chile. The nebula’s formal name is IC 2944. Because it’s visible to the naked eye it has a nickname too: The Running Chicken Nebula.
According to ESO’s description, the clouds are Thackeray globules “under fierce bombardment from the ultraviolet radiation from nearby hot young stars.”
Click here or on the image to find out what will happen to the clouds.
If you know where to look on a clear night, you can see a running chicken in the sky.
(photo of stellar nursery IC 2944 by ESO, the European Southern Observatory at Cerro Paranal, Chile. Click on the image to see the original)
While we listen and watch for pine siskins in Pennsylvania, here’s one of their cousins from the other side of the world.
This male Eurasian siskin (Carduelis spinus) resembles a pine siskin but his colors are more striking with his black cap and bright yellow and black wings and tail. He lives in northern Europe and northeastern Asia and irrupts southward in some winters, just like our siskins do. (Click here to see North America’s pine siskin for comparison.)
Without knowing his identity you could probably guess “siskin” if you saw him in Taiwan where he was photographed by K.Lin (a.k.a. Hiyashi Haka).
Please click on the image to see the original photo and scroll down to read K.Lin’s description of this bird.
(photo by K. Lin, Hiyashi Haka on Flickr, Creative Common license)
Except for the “jumpy” attitude in her eye, this beautiful bird looks as if she forages slowly on the ground.
Silver-eared mesias (Leiothrix argentauris) are native to Southeast Asia where they live in the forest eating insects and fruit.
DNA testing recently re-classed them into new family (Leiothrichidae) and genus names (Leiothrix instead of Mesia), so it’s confusing when you look them up. The books are hopelessly out of date and the Internet has both names.
At this link to an old name, Mesia argentauris, you’ll find videos, photos and sounds. The birds are so fast-moving that some of the videos are posted in slow motion! Even when standing still, silver-eared mesias rapidly flick their wings and tails. Click here to see a male foraging at a feeding station. Wow!
This female was photographed in Mae Wong National Park in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand. After you’ve seen them move, you realize how hard it was to capture this sharp photo.
(this photo is a Featured Picture on Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original.)
He looks like a shorebird, doesn’t he? But you won’t find him in North America.
This is a spotted or Cape thick-knee (Burhinus capensis), a nocturnal(!) bird who lives in the tall grass of the African savannah.
Cris Hamilton photographed this one in the Serengeti in eastern Africa.
If you don’t want to travel that far you can see him at the National Aviary.
(photo by Cris Hamilton)
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From a distance the king vulture (Sarcoramphus papa) of Central and South America looks simply black and white but up close his naked head is amazing.
That’s his skin that’s so colorful — yellow, orange, red, blue, gray and purple.
Ugly but beautiful.
(This featured photo on Wikimedia Commons (Creative Commons license) was taken at Weltvogelpark Walsrode in Germany. Click on the image to see the original)