Friday, February 24, 2017

Feathers on Friday

I unfortunately have not post many of these lately. Here is a simple photo of  a chickadee from a few weeks ago.

Black-capped Chickadee



Other Feathers on Fridays:

Prairie Birder

Back Yard Bird Blog

Wolf Song Blog

Birds In Your Back Yard

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Owls at Hecla Island

On February 4th we head up to Hecla Island with Christian Artuso to see if we could see some winter birds. It is a two hour drive, and is located on Lake Winnipeg.
We took a lot of photos, and I have not gone through them yet, so I am just going to make a quick post with a few photos for now.

The first notable bird was a Northern Hawk owl that we saw as we crossed the causeway to the island, though it was a good distance away and we didn't get a good picture of that one.

Northern Hawk Owl

From then on we saw numerous owls, totaling 4 Northern Hawk Owls and 4 Great Grey Owls. We sat in the car watching the Great Grey Owls for a while, waiting for a good photo opportunity. They would take off and fly every once in a while, which made for some great photos.

Great Grey Owl
Great Grey Owl

By looking for 'scaling', that is bark stripped of trees,and listening for tapping, we were able to find a Three Toed Woodpecker. It was a lifer for us! They are very quite elusive, but quite approachable when found. The one we found was pecking on a tree only one foot of the ground, so it made for great pictures.


 Other birds we saw were grouse, both Ruffed and Sharp-tailed.
Sharp-tailed Grouse


Northern Hawk Owl

As we were sitting watching the owls, I decided I could take some short videos to compile together. Here it is:


I still hope to make another post more fully covering our trip, but it might be a bit before I can process all the photos.

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

What Bird Wednesday

Here's a photo crop from a while ago. Can you guess what that bird is? Leave your guess in the comments.


Other WBW Posts:

Bird Boy

Canadian Birder