A female Red-winged Blackbird, clinging to a cattail, considers her options for a mate at the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge yesterday. Male Red-winged blackbirds clung to other cattails or, like this one, to common tansy, as they showed off their epaulets and warbled their mating calls to attract females. She flew off after a short time. Whether it was because she wanted time to think or because she sought out better options, she had decisions to make.
The day started out with a drizzle as we headed back to the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge in Montana early Wednesday morning. Our plan was to photograph Red-winged Blackbirds as they displayed and called to potential mates, their breath showing as vapor just as our breath shows in cold temperatures. With the rain, the weather wasn’t quite cold enough and instead we were treated to a couple of hours of watching both Red-winged Blackbirds and Yellow-headed Blackbirds as they defended territories at the edge of the pond in the refuge, chasing each other among the reeds and cattails. The Yellow-headed Blackbird provided a bit of sunshine on a rainy day.
When I opened the Merlin app yesterday morning, the Black-billed Magpie was depicted as “Your Bird of the Day.” The Black-billed Magpie is a bird that is common in Montana but not in the Central Valley of California where the Yellow-billed Magpie is what people call Magpies. I started out the morning at Moose’s Ranch where we shot Black-billed Magpies from Moose’s hide. Then, in the afternoon, we drove to the nearby Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge that was set aside as a refuge for the protection of migratory birds in 1964. There, we encountered this Black-billed Magpie shortly after we arrived yesterday afternoon. I’m not sure what it was eating but the Magpie seemed to enjoy it.
The male Osprey in Cape Hatteras had his work cut out for him. Besides bringing nesting materials to the nest site, he brought fish to his mate. In this shot, he looks up at the nest as he approaches with a fish clutched in his talons.
If there ever were a display of a “feel good” moment, it’s this, a Sanderling preening. I had the great good fortune while on Cape Hatteras last week to watch Sanderlings, those tiny constantly moving shorebirds and my favorite shorebirds, stop for minutes at a time and preen their feathers. At one time I had two preening side by side. In the past, I’ve seen Sanderlings stop so rarely that it’s always been a challenge to photograph them as they chase the surf and it chases them back. This was not only an obvious feel good moment for this Sanderling, capturing this was a feel good moment for me, too.
The male Osprey was doing his best to deliver nesting materials that his mate approved. At first, we didn’t think that this tattered piece of landscape fabric would survive the test. When we returned to the nest the next afternoon, the tattered remnant was hanging precariously off the edge of the nest, possibly after being discarded. But, it got hung up on one of the twigs. And, on the third afternoon, while the male was away, the female moved the remnant from the outer edge to the middle area of the nest. I don’t know if it stayed there but at least for the moment, she seemed to approve and decided that it made for good nesting material.
We spent three afternoons on Cape Hatteras delighting in the antics of a pair of Osprey as they constructed their nest on a platform out in Currituck Sound. The male, on the left, seemed to work hard at pleasing his mate, the larger female, who often seemed skeptical of his choices of nesting materials. It’s not visible in this closeup but the nest includes not only the lichen covered sticks broken off from trees on the shoreline but pieces of tattered black landscape fabric, some of which we witnessed being delivered. The female seemed to call nonstop when her mate was away from the nest. She would pick at sticks and rearrange bits in the nest, including dragging some of that tattered landscape fabric to the center of the nest. We watched as she extracted a large stick and dropped it into the surrounding waters, seemingly displeased with its presence. When the male returned, he retrieved the still floating stick and returned it to the nest. On our last afternoon, he teased her with a flyby as he carried a still flapping fish to a nearby piling and began to eat it. She called to him but he ignored her. Much later, much to our delight and I’m sure to hers, he brought her what remained of the fish he’d caught earlier. After three days of observing them, they reminded me of an old married couple whose bickering had replaced affection. In an anthropomorphic way, I thought this “beak to beak” stand-off illustrated their relationship, not unlike The Bickering Bickersons.
A storm came in Wednesday and brought a bit of rain to the Outer Banks during the afternoon. The rain stopped late in the day and the sun tried to peek through the remaining storm clouds at the kayak ramp in the Town of Duck’s local park.
The beaches on Cape Hatteras are pristine and at this time of year, mostly devoid of people. Yesterday morning we found a beach that not only had plenty of shorebirds (Willets, Sanderlings, and American Golden Plovers) but we had the beach to ourselves for a couple of hours. A guy rode by on a bicycle but that was it. How nice it was to enjoy the gorgeous morning light without having people walking along the shoreline and scaring off our subjects. An American Golden Plover strolled by.
The high winds on the Outer Banks, or OBX as this area is known, kept the birds off the beach and hunkered down. So, instead of beach panning yesterday, we photographed an Osprey nest. The pair of Osprey was busy building a nest using sticks and reeds and even landscape fabric.