Birds of May and June

May and June were busy months for birding, so busy that my plan to write one post about all the action has turned into a plan to post three! (You can see the first one, about baby juncos, here.) All of the rest of the baby bird activity going on in my yard will get a separate post, but first I'd like to showcase some birds that I'd never seen and/or photographed before, as well as some of my favorite bird shots from the past two months. First up: birds I've never photographed before. Remember, you can click on photos to enlarge them, which I highly recommend doing!

An evil-looking chicken. I've photographed chickens before, but never one so sinister-looking!

The first group of birds were photographed at a park that I love near Little Buddy's house. The park is home to a bunch of different farm animals, including sheep, goats, pigs, ponies, cows, chickens, rabbits, and geese, as well as a variety of wild birds. I did include a domesticated goose on the list, as I've never photographed one (who knew that they had blue eyes?), but everyone else is wild. I was especially pleased by the cowbirds, since I don't think I've ever seen them before. I was also very excited to get some closeup shots of barn swallows (in an actual barn!) because I've found that swallows are virtually impossible to photograph on the wing.

Male brown-headed cowbird.

Male brown-headed cowbird.

Female brown-headed cowbird.

Male house sparrow.

Female house sparrow with a beak full of bugs for her young.

Male house sparrow. They were nesting in the rafters of the pig shed.

Chinese goose (domesticated).

Barn swallow couple.

Barn swallow. This open-beak shot shows you how they are able to scarf up bugs while flying at high speeds!

Barn swallow closeup.

I scored a few more birds for my list at another park I visited while looking after Little Buddy. Among these are a pair of violet-green swallows that I hastily shot when they landed in the dirt a few feet away right as I was despairing of ever getting a good photograph of one as I watched them whirl and swoop over a wetland. I think they were gathering nesting material. I also got a photo of a house wren (which I've seen before) and a couple of sparrows that I hadn't.

Violet-green swallows.

You can see how they got their name!

House wren

White-crowned sparrow.

Savannah sparrow.

A third park is one of my favorite places to photograph. It has a bonanza of not only birds on and around its bay and wetlands, but things like frogs and turtles, too! I'm hardly alone in photographing there, as you will almost always encounter a pro with one of those $20,000 lenses as well as some hardcore amateurs. (I'm pleased to say that my new lens elevates me into the ranks of the latter group, at least in terms of equipment.) The colder months are actually the best time to get the widest variety of bird photos because quite a few species spend the winter there and the lily pads haven't blanketed the best cove for photographing, but it's always worth looking around. On my most recent trip, I scored a wood duck and a nesting grebe!

Male wood duck, eclipse (or non-breeding) plumage.

Female pied-billed grebe on a nest. 

And then there are the backyard birds. The hermit thrush is not one we've seen in our yard before. It spent several days hanging around, drawing a great deal of ire from the towhees. I see pileated woodpeckers every once in while around my house and they are common out at Cutie the Pyrenees' place, but I haven't had a good chance to take any pictures. I hope eventually to get better photos than the ones I got, but you can at least see what one looks like. I'm much happier with the rufous hummingbird photos--we haven't had a rufous around for the last few years, so these visits by a female are a delight. And I managed to score a photo of something you rarely see: a hummingbird catching bugs! Unbeknownst to most people, hummingbirds also eat insects to get the protein that nectar can't supply. I was taking pictures of the hummingbird slowly motoring around among the branches of one our cedars, but didn't know I was capturing an insect hunt until I looked at the images on my computer and saw the hummingbird with beak open, about to grab some little flying critter.

Hermit thrush.

Pileated woodpecker.

Female rufous hummingbird. You can see the rufous coloring on her sides. Males also have reddish feathers on their heads.

Female rufous hummingbird

Female rufous hummingbird catching an insect.

You can see another great photo of this hummingbird here.

The following photos represent an interesting case: I have neither seen nor photographed a Western tanager. However, my CAMERA has photographed a Western tanager. My parents spotted this striking bird visiting our backyard birdbath while I wasn't around and my father had the presence of mind to grab my camera (which is always kept near the back door for just this reason) and take several photos. It came around the twice that day, but if it's been back since, I haven't seen it. I could hardly keep these photos taken in my yard with my camera from you simply because I didn't take them myself!

Western tanager, non-breeding male. Breeding males have vivid red faces/heads.

Male western tanager.

Late spring is a busy time for all birds, so I've had many opportunities to photograph the species that call my neighborhood home, as well as a few other familiar birds I've encountered on excursions.

First up are three photos from the latter category:

I highly recommend getting over the fact that pigeons are pigeons and instead marvel at their plumage. 

I've tried to take a lot of photos of male red-winged blackbirds since getting my birding lens, but their inky blackness make them hard to photograph well. I liked how this image captures the bird's rather cheeky expression.

"Don't mess with our nests!"
A pair of male red-winged blackbirds chase a crow away from their nesting site.

Our birdbath is extremely popular, so I take lots and lots of photos of birds bathing. The jay photo in the following group is among the very best birdbath photos I've every shot.

A VERY wet Steller's jay.

See more great photos from the jay's splashing bath here.

Red-breasted nuthatch.

The sapsuckers are wonderfully striking birds...

...but this one looks a bit ridiculous with the wet feathers exposing the skinniness of its neck! Note also the juvenile junco bound and determined to take a bath at the same time in the background.

You'll need to click on this photo to enlarge it to see the detail that I like best about this photo of a drinking red-shafted flicker. Flickers feed almost exclusively on ants and on this bird's red "mustache" is a little red ant that got away!

Here's are a few other photos from the yard:

This chestnut-backed chickadee is scolding me for accidentally getting too close to its offspring.

I caught this starling with its mouth opening unleashing a stream of brassy starling calls.

A crow picks a cherry from the neighbors' tree.

A robin gobbles mahonia berries.

This male robin spied me with my camera, flew to the back of a chair about six feet away from me, puffed himself up, and gave me a LOOK. I didn't need to speak robin in order to understand his meaning: don't even THINK about going near his newly-fledged children! 

During these past two months, I've been able to add the hermit thrush, the Western tanager, and house finches to our list of all the different bird species that have visited the yard over time. Just the other day, I went out with my camera to investigate an unfamiliar bird call and discovered it was being made by an osprey at the top of a nearby tree! If I can count (and I have) bald eagles as visitors to the yard since they periodically come by to sit in trees within a hundred feet of our house (three of them came calling one day a few weeks ago, two of them pictured below), I've decided I can count this osprey, too. What exactly it was doing here, I don't know, as they usually stick very close to the lake, but it was definitely a cool score. It's not the first time I've photographed an osprey, nor the best photo of an osprey I've taken, however. That would be one of the ones I shot in Florida when I came upon an osprey drying its wings on a branch just above my head. I've included it here because it's a cool picture.

A pair of adult bald eagles in the neighbors' tree. A third eagle soared high overhead, occasionally communicating in shrieks with the two in the tree.

Suburban Seattle osprey.

Rural Florida Panhandle osprey.

As you can see, it has been an exciting couple of months of bird photography, and I haven't even gotten to the baby birds yet! Avian activity will naturally die down a bit after all the little birds have grown up, but I look forward to taking more bird photos this summer, especially of hummingbirds. And who knows what will show up next in the yard or surrounding trees? It definitely keeps life interesting (I saw nineteen different bird species in the yard on a single day two weeks ago) and I will no doubt be posting more photos in the future!

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The Fungi Files: More Miscellaneous Mushrooms

I have several serious, writing-intensive posts that I'm working on, a process much slowed by the fact that the weather has been abysmal, sending wave after wave of wind and rain my way, resulting in wave after wave of fatigue and migraines. To tide you over until I can get my deep thoughts written down, here's another photo-centric post on fungi.

In the three and a half months since I posted about mushrooms with gills, the three months since I posted about mushrooms with pores, and the two months since I posted about some of the more strange kinds of fungi you can find (a post you should definitely check out if you haven't seen it already), I naturally took a great many more photos. Most of them are pictures of mushrooms with gills and I believe with the exception of perhaps one or two, none of the species shown here were featured in any of those previous blogposts. The photos are arranged in no particular order, though the first third of the post features mostly mushrooms I found in my yard and the rest is devoted to mushrooms I found in the forest. As always, you can click on photos to enlarge them and I recommend that you do!

These little orange mushrooms seem to be common lawn inhabitants.

They begin to invert as they age.

The caps are about the size of the nail on your pinkie finger.

I upended one to look at its gills.

This is one of the few species previously featured. As you can see, great swaths of them sprouted in our lawn.

I find them very charming.

A cluster of tiny, orange-capped mushrooms emerge from the moss and leaf litter.

I found a big colony of these mushrooms in the gloom beneath some overgrown shrubs and spent several weeks documenting the evolution of their caps as they matured.

The caps started out quite purple.

As they opened up, the color started to fade and the caps often split.

A trio of wide-open caps--the largest is perhaps an inch and a half across.

Eventually, the caps inverted...

…and grew increasingly dry and pale...

…until they looked like this.

A portion of the colony.

They weren't the only mushrooms growing under the same shrubs. Four different varieties sprout next to one another in this photo.

The brown one on the bottom left in the above photo looked like these as it matured.

The cap of this mushroom was mostly orange when it emerged...

…but the new growth as the cap expanded was white. 

A similar mushroom from another part of the yard. I could never decide if it was the same variety.

It lasted an unusually long time, so I photographed it many stages.

Unlike the purple mushrooms, which split from underneath, this orange-capped mushroom is splitting from the top down as it grows.

This mushroom with its deep red cap was very popular food source. It's probably related--if not the same species--to the "twin" mushrooms from my previous post on gilled mushrooms.

This mushroom had scaly cap...

…as did this one.

I never tired of seeing mushrooms muscling their way out of the ground.

This cluster of large, white mushrooms were hidden under a layer of fallen leaves.

A mature mushroom standing high about the leaf litter.

Large, off-white mushrooms of a type commonly found on our lawn.

This mushroom is splitting at the top as the cap matures.

The cap on this particular specimen had barely begun to unfold but had already spilt around a central point.

You can see it in the background after it matured in this photo showing two varieties of fungi.

This "lawnscape" shows the proliferation of white mushrooms in November.

A pair seen from the top...

….and from the side.

The emergence of another fruiting body has pushed one mushroom over on its side, revealing the arched structure of the gills.

While these dark brown mushrooms didn't grown in my lawn, I found them in several other lawns of my acquaintance.

They are, in fact, my favorite variety of lawn mushrooms.

They invert as they age in a particularly beautiful way...

…exposing their light brown gills.

This grouping shows the species in multiple stages.

Gills the color of chocolate buttercream.

Unlike most mushrooms I see of similar size and body type, this species grew in a tight clump.

The stalk on this mushroom was nearly six inches tall!

I found these red-capped beauties beneath a row of apple trees.

The largest were about two inches across.

They had a fairy-tale air about them.

They were definitely one of my favorite varieties among the many I found this fall.

And now on to the forest mushrooms...

I found these small, pale mushrooms growing DOWNWARD out of a decaying stump on long, slender stalks.

These brown-capped mushrooms are growing directly out of the side of a log end that also hosts some toothed fungus.

Tiny orange mushrooms grow on another log face under the umbrella of a polypore.

This larger mushroom was all by its lonesome as it projected from the side of a fallen log.

I believe this is the same variety as the mushroom above, just a more mature specimen...

But is this? Same growth habit, same stalk color, but a darker (more mature?) cap.

These deep orange mushrooms blaze against the green mossy tree they are growing on.

I thought this shade of orange was both striking and beautiful.

These paler orange mushrooms are growing out from the end of a log covered in white slime mold.

Gray mushrooms with fluted caps sprout from a mossy crevice.

The stalks appear to weaken as they age.

I found mushroom colonies of all kinds growing on or near fallen logs in the woods.

A spacious stair-stepping set...

….a crowded colony...

…and a spangled log...

…with a scattering of clusters.

This stump was covered with multiple colonies of photogenic fungi.

Its top and sides produced the seven photos below.

Corals cozy up with capped mushrooms.

The moss-covered top of a downed tree trunk also harbors many mushrooms...

...as does this one.

A classic umbrella silhouette.

These yellow mushrooms had unusually limp and moist caps.

I liked the look of these little long-stemmed mushrooms on the end of a stick. I wonder what they looked like when their caps opened?

Small, ghostly, gray mushrooms whose caps are nearly transparent at the edges. (I think I DO have a picture of one of these in the earlier gilled mushrooms post, but it was a top view!)

This particular downed log spans a creek. A trio of mushrooms make a home on its limb.

These mushrooms overlook the water running white over the creek's rocks.

This tiny purplish mushroom clinging to the side of a log had a cap no larger than the nail of my little finger.

These mushrooms, as you can see...

...all grew in a row at the base of a fallen log.

Llittle gray mushrooms clustered next to a fallen log.

A different group of mushrooms had yellow centers and pale edges.

Here's a closeup of one of them.

There was one variety of mushrooms that very, very long, thin stalks

A closeup of the cap.

This grouping shows this type of mushroom at various stages of maturity.

These mushrooms were very dry in appearance.

A closeup of one of the caps.

These flared mushrooms were growing under the shelter of a log.

Detail of the underside of a mushroom's cap.

A big mushroom after pushing its way out of the dirt.

An upended mushroom.

Some critter had been pulling them up and snacking on them

Gills.

This mushroom's cap was almost completely inverted by the time it got munched on.

This large mushroom--six inches across or so--had a brown cap and an upward-furling edge.

A view of the gills on the underside.

I always like the sight of a mushroom pushing up the fallen leaves.

Here's another mushroom that's broken free of its leafy blanket.

The most charming and unique mushroom habitat I encountered was this pinecone that was host to twin mushrooms.

It was impossible not to think of antennae or eye stalks when looking at these little mushrooms rising from the pinecone's tip!

Mushrooms sprouting in a tree cavity.

This broken snag had multiple varieties of mushroom growing on it.

I waited all winter for this particular type of mushroom to sprout on a stump at the stable where I ride horses. This one is about  foot across.

The wholly inverted structure creates gorgeous, gill-scored waves.

A rising fungal crescendo.

The underside of the mushroom was exposed when a horses knocked it off the stump. As you can see, it was producing still more waves!



It's one of the most beautiful mushroom's I've photographed.



Now, I don't rightly know what this next mushroom is. When I saw it near the mailboxes by my house, I thought it had been upended and snacked on by an animal. When I tried to turn it over with my toe, however, I discovered that it was still firmly rooted to the ground. The animal had been eating it from the top down! It looks like it was probably a mushroom with pores rather than gills. I'm sorry it did not get to assume its full size, as it was at least six inches across even in what I believe was a still-developing state.


Eaten from the top of the cap in.

A detail of the interior flesh.

A side view shows a little bit of the dark, leathery, textured cap exterior.

Speaking of other fungi varieties, I did encounter a few more interesting polypores.

One branch on this tree had a group of polypores along the underside.

As you can see (especially if you click on the photo to enlarge it), the pore surface has a jagged, or toothed, appearance.

Another view of the branch. I though they were an especially elegant collection.

These shelf fungi also had a jagged, toothed pore surfaces.

You can see both the underside and the unusual texture of the lip in this image.

I hadn't encountered any polypores quite like this one, so it was an exciting find!

I found this toothed fungus growing in a big patch in a tree cavity.

To round out the categories I've previously reported on, I also found more puffballs. This particular type grew in a dense colony and looked much softer than those whose photos I posted in the previous blog.

You can see the spores (especially if you click to enlarge) within this burst puffball.

The spent puffballs were very flaccid in appearance.

A still-firm puffball whose cap is just beginning to crack has an interesting textured surface

Another look at puffball spores.



I have things to say yet on the subject of lichens and molds, but this likely wraps up posts on what we might think of as more traditional fungi until next autumn. I hope you've enjoyed taking a photographic stroll through the various fruiting bodies of fungi that can be found in my neck of the woods between September and March and that it has perhaps opened your eyes to seeing what is sprouting all around you in your own.

In review:

Mushrooms with Gills

Mushrooms with Pores

Polypores, Corals, Jellies & More

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