Hawk Ridge with Pictures

[puzzle_me]

I finally got around to uploading my pictures to livejournal!

First off, I got a new camera. I have been using what was a really nice digital camera when I got it about seven years ago. It still takes beautiful pictures, but it's bulky and digital camera technology has come a long way. My new camera has 14x optical zoom (my old one had only had 4x), is smaller, has more than twice the resolution, and takes hd video.

Here's an example of the zoom. Taken from the overlook at Hawk Ridge, this is looking out over Lake Superior:



If you squint, maybe you can see that there's a big ship in the Duluth harbor. Here my camera is fully zoomed in on the ship:



And I am happy with the quality of the photos. Here is a shot I took of a sharp-shinned hawk they brought up from the banding station:



I love how well the deep red of the hawk's eyes turned out, and how sharply in focus I was able to get the hawk.

Anyhow, I will now put an lj-cut in, since this is only about 1/4 of the pictures for this entry.


The thing from the weekend that I'm still most excited about was getting to hold a northern saw-whet owl. Here I am!



And here's a close-up of one of the owls:



At this point, I have to give a shout-out to one of the Hawk Ridge staff. Erik, our count interpreter (basically he constantly scans the sky for raptors and shouts out what they are as they come into view) is a wonderful photographer. He spent the past winter in Oregon, studying cavity nesters, and got the cutest photo of a saw-whet owl I've seen yet. It is here. He's selling prints of it and I'm seriously tempted to buy one.

Other than the owls, we got a lot of good birds at the banding station. The highlight was the peregrine falcon:



But we also got a pair of smaller falcons, here's a merlin:



No kestrels this past weekend, which would have completed the set of falcons typically found in Minnesota. One of the other banders in Duluth (the same one that got a gyrfalcon last year), got a prairie falcon earlier this fall. They're usually not seen this far east.

We also banded a LARGE cooper's hawk this past weekend. They are a little bit unusual to see in Duluth - though very common here in the cities. For the most part, sharp-shinned hawks and coopers hawks don't overlap ranges in Minnesota. They're similar in size (coopers are a bit bigger, but there's overlap), and go after similar food sources, so I think the coopers push the smaller sharp-shinned hawks north. In any case, I didn't have a chance to get a picture of the coopers - I was busy chatting with some visitors - but the coopers managed to foot one of the other volunteers with a talon and he was showing off his wound:



In addition to banding raptors, they do also band songbirds (passerines). They have a separate banding station that's currently undergoing some rehab, so right now they just band a handful of passerines each day. Here are some pictures of the education director, Debbie, banding a hairy woodpecker:





In the second photo she's measuring the wing.

One of the neat moments this weekend was when a merlin swooped in to take a few passes at our decoy owl. We have this fake owl up on a tall pole to bait some of the smaller raptors (sharp-shinned hawks, merlins and kestrels). Owls eat the young of all of these birds, so if they see an owl they will try to drive it off. When birds dive at the owl, it affords us a nice close look at them. Usually they take a pass or two, and they fly off. But the merlin that swooped in took about five passes, and then went and perched in a tree next to it. None of us had ever seen one perch in that tree - it's so close in and so exposed.

Diving at the owl decoy:



Perching in the tree:



Finally, the fall colors were beautiful this weekend. Here's a picture I took on a trail near the overlook that shows how vivid they were:

Comments

[saphirepassion.livejournal.com]

I really liked the pictures you took. :)

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

a project for you

[springbok1.livejournal.com]

Cute. Not sure that all the noodles and pumpkin seeds in the world would be enough to make Kyuuri not freak out when she's on her back - early on I tried to train her to be okay with laying in my hand, but it didn't go well. Senegal parrots (like the one in the video), are notorious for hanging out on their backs. There was one I interacted with at the bird rescue that liked to lie on its back, grab onto a pen, and have me drag it around the table, on its back, by the pen it was grasping.