Quizzes

Just what is the relationship between birding and bird photography? I know people who won’t ‘count’ a bird unless they’ve got a good image of it, and I know, alas, many people who leave the identifying of their photos to the sometimes dubious expertise offered by one or another of the internet “forums.”
I’ve ranted before about [...]

Most everybody got it right, which speaks volumes to the advances made in hummingbird identification in the last decade, thanks particularly to the splendid photographic guide by Steve Howell. In the old days of the Petersonian “field mark,” we were taught to look at the head pattern of male hummingbirds, and essentially to guess on [...]

Denis, Dave, and I stopped at Tom Beatty’s and at Ramsey Canyon briefly on our way home yesterday. We didn’t find any real rarities at the feeders, though you didn’t hear any of us complaining about Blue-throated, Magnificent, and White-eared Hummingbirds! It was good practice for me, with a Hummingbird Workshop coming up in a [...]

Live shorebirds are usually easier than photos: not only can you walk around them for a different angle, but they do things like move and call, offering clues a static image never reveals.
All the same, this Least Sandpiper, distant and blurry though it may be, didn’t fool anybody. Sewage pond habitués (probably the only people to [...]

I really enjoy living in a part of the world that has shorebirds in winter. This lovely creature was at the Avra Valley ponds Saturday morning.
 
Whaddaya think?