Shorebird Season

Shorebird habitat is hard to find around here this year. Lots of water during the spring and summer (except June) had resulted in full ponds with lots of vegetation right to the current waterline which eliminates the mud flats and exposed shorelines favored by this group of birds.
I did manage to find one pond that had a rather limited patch of favored foraging conditions and I spent a few minutes taking some photos. The Long-billed Dowitcher pictured above was one of the species I found.


Least Sandpiper - these were probably the most numerous of the shorebirds at the reservoir I was at.


Least Sandpiper


Least Sanpiper


Pectoral Sandpiper


Pectoral Sandpiper - looks like he is spitting. Must have been a bad bug.

I really wanted to get some photos of the Stilt Sandpipers and I was able to do so.


Itchy ear.


I managed to catch the bird above with a small worm or larvae in the tip of it's bill.


I have lots of photos like this, only with less head exposed on a majority of them.



There were also Baird's and Semipalmated Sandpipers in the mix but I only managed to get a few photos of one Baird's (below).

Morning Commuters

This is one of the guys I regularly see in the morning. He and the rest of his friends are usually heading home as the sun comes up and I am heading to work.

Ferruginous Hawks

A few weeks ago I was heading down a dirt road and when I came over the hill there was a recently fledged brood of 5 young Ferruginous Hawk clustered in the middle of the road with both parents circling above. They all flushed before I could stop and wound up sitting on a nearby hill. They seemed to not be used to being apart and wound up clustered there as well. As I watched they flushed, one by one, to the nearby nest.





The adults kept circling me, letting me know they were still watching.



Later in the day another flew by.



The Ferruginous Hawk is one of our most common breeding hawks, along with the Swainson's Hawk and the Northern Harrier. This one was nesting at the end of a raptor survey route I ran with Dad early in June.



Shortly after seeing the Ferruginous Hawks that day I found this larger cousin, an immature Golden Eagle, circling in an updraft with a Northern Harrier.

Another Summer Thunderstorm on the Prairie

Last night we had a quick developing thunderstorm move through the area. Crean and I were outside watching a couple of young and spotted White-tailed Deer fawns stroll through the neighborhood as the clouds gathered from the west. Pretty soon watching the cloud formations won out over cavorting fawns and I headed inside to grab the camera.









Crean and I just made it back inside when the wind hit. Soon the Mourning Doves were dodging cottonwood branches as they tacked into the wind trying to head towards the trees. A couple doves shot past the house at right angles to the wind, moving fast wherever the wind took them. A brief shower and then it was done.

Buffalo Guys

A couple of days ago I was able to get out as the sun was setting and I headed to the bison pasture to see if they were near the fence in the warm light. There are two mature bulls in the pasture and they were off by themselves near the fence.



I wasn't sure if there was some animosity between the two bulls in the short time I was watching them but there seemed to be a bit of tension between the two.







This bull exhibited a Flehmen response, probably a reaction to the scent of the urine of one of the other animals. This response is thought to help expose the vomeronasal organ, a chemoreceptor organ mainly used to detect pheremones, to the scent molecules.



The bison were attended by Brown-headed Cowbirds.



It was nice to see the cowbirds feeding on insects flushed by the feeding bison, a role they had occupied for millennia. I was able forget for a moment their more recent role as a avian parahia, leaving their eggs in other birds nests for the host species to raise, a behavior well adapted to following ever moving bison herds, but trouble for novel host species as cowbirds expanded beyond the short grass prairies and replaced their association with the ever moving bison with more widely distributed and more sedentary domestic livestock.



It was a glimpse back in time that could have occured thousands of years ago in exactly the same place.

Bitey Things

Earlier this week while on a tour with a major land management agency I found a couple of interesting animals that I don't get to see everyday.

The first was this orb weaving spider my interns found in the grass as we were setting up a plot to measure Greater Sage-Grouse habitat. We had inadvertently flushed a few grasshoppers into her net and she was busy wrapping them up for a later meal.





We watched as she made her way from grasshopper to grasshopper, wrapping each in its own individual silken coffin. After each was well wrapped she would make a quick bite and move back to the center of the web. Even though she had unwrapped and subdued grasshoppers remaining stuck in the net, she would pause in the center before moving on to the next trapped grasshopper. We speculated that she was replenishing her spinnerets before she headed off to the next victim.



If you click on either of the previous two photos to enlarge it, you can see the silk emerging from her spinnerets as she rolled the grasshoppers around to cover them in silk.

On our way home we nearly ran over this larger fanged animal of the Great Plains - a Prairie Rattlesnake (Crotalis viridis), the only rattlesnake found in Montana. It was lying in the middle of the gravel road and I had to swerve around her as we came over a hill. Before I could turn around another pickup passed us in the opposite direction and I thought for sure that they would hit it, but when we were able to turn around, the snake was still there in the middle of the road.



At first I wasn't too sure the it was still alive. As you can see in the photo above, there was a small stick laying across it's back and it wasn't moving at all. I scuffed a few pebbles from the road its way just to check and it became apparent real quick that the snake was indeed alive.





Shortly after I took these photos another pickup rolled over the hill coming our way. I hurried to pressure the snake off the road and into the grass, but it really wanted to make sure I would not get any closer, so it kept this pose as it slid slowly towards the road edge. Having a rattlesnake watch me like this certainly worked at keeping me a safe distance away.
The pickup pulled up next to me and the young man in the window peered out from under his well used felt cowboy hat and then looked down at the snake coiled up next to his truck and asked "Do you want a gun to kill that thing?"
I said "naw, I am just going to kick it off into the grass, but thanks"
"ok" he said and slowly shook his head back and forth as he rolled away from us.

I continued to pressure the snake until it moved all the way off the road and into the grass and disappeared.

Travels

Well, we did go south, but not too far and certainly not to the other side of the world as suggested by the photos in my previous post. Last week we took our nieces back to Colorado and visited my sister and family in Wyoming along the way. The photos from the previous post were taken at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs, CO (hence the close-ups - needed to get rid of fences etc.). Here are a few more photos of the trip.



One of the activities at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo is the chance to feed the giraffes. Both Crean (above) and Benton (below) enjoyed feeding them and feeling their long, black, tongues.




We also visited the Rocky Mountain Dinosaur Resource Center in Woodland Park. Benton is a big dinosaur fan and we had a good time investigating all the skeletons and re-creations in the center.



Neither Benton nor Crean were particularly comfortable around the dinosaur recreations in front of the Center.



They also had a wonderful little exhibit on Darwin that I really enjoyed.






Below are a few of the more "normal" residents of Colorado and southern Wyoming.


Steller's Jay


Pygmy Nuthatch


Rufus Hummingbird


Fireweed


Least Chipmunk


Golden-mantled Ground Squirrel


The van put on a few miles and wound up with a rather thick coated of grasshopper remains over the front grill and fog lights. This year is particularly bad and they were very conspicuous between Gillette, Wyoming and Miles City, Montana. Much of the vegetation along the road had been stripped of leaves and there were occasional sparse "flocks" moving across the highway and thumping onto the windshield like scattered raindrops.