Evening Visitor

This evening when I got home from work I was visiting with Laura in the kitchen and I caught a glimpse of a bird fly out of the backyard with something in it's talons. It was just a quick glimpse and I couldn't tell exactly what it was. A few minutes later it flew back into the apple tree just outside of our dining room window. We were able to get a good look and it soon was apparent that it was a little owl. I originally thought it was a Saw-whet Owl but after I was able to grab the binoculars I discovered it was an Eastern Screech Owl. I have heard them before in our backyard but this was our first observation.



I was able to get fairly close to him and got a couple of photos. No wonder I am not finding too many voles in the back yard this year.

No Email

If anyone is trying to reach me via my email account and not getting a response please don't think bad of me. It looks like my email stopped receiving emails about noon yesterday. Hopefully it will be back soon.

Another New Book and Neighbor Blogs

I recently found out that my friend Trevor Herriot will have his latest book Grass, Sky, Song: Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds published this month. I am really looking forward to reading it. Trevor came to visit a few years ago and we toured around the prairie of Valley County looking at the landscapes and talking about birds as part of a radio program, Pastures Unsung, that Trevor was working on then. I believe that this book is an outgrowth of that program. Trevor also recently started his own blog and you can find it on my sidebar. I found out about Trevor's new blog through Craig Larson at Native Shores who contacted me about some of my photos. Trevor had both of us listed on his sidebar and Craig wandered over to Prairie Ice. I have added Native Shores to my sidebar as well and I am looking forward to reading more about Manitoba from him (and I thought the winter has been cold and nasty here!).
I also recently added Saskatchewan Birds, Nature and Scenery by Nick Saunders in Saskatoon as well. I have been following his blog for a while and finally realized I hadn't linked to it and so I got that fixed.

Antarctic Mountains

Here are a few photos of the mountains along the Antarctic Peninsula. They were particularly snow covered this year. There really isn't much else I can say about this landscape. I think the photos hit the thousand word mark and then some.

Two New Books

There are two new book coming out soon that I am interested in seeing. The first is the Field Guide to Songbirds of South America: The Passerines by Robert Ridgley and Guy Tudor. This field guide isn't really new - I suspect it is a reworking of the duos previous two, rather large volumes - The Passerines of South America - Volume 1, the oscine passerines and Volume 2, the suboscine passerines. Even though it is not really new, the field guide format is much needed and appreciated. I remember birding in Argentina with a substandard guide and being very frustrated with the illustrations and information in that guide and wishing that I had even the plates from the Ridgley and Tudor books tucked into my pocket. I just wish they had finished the anticipated next volume(s) on the non-passerines of South America and had those plates and information to fit into the field guide as well. For now, I am still stuck carrying two field guides if I want to bird those countries of South America without their own decent field guide, such as Argentina. At least in southern Argentinal Alvaro Jaramillo, Peter Burke, and David Beadles Birds of Chile still serves as an excellent resource for all the birds found there.

The other new title I am looking forward to is a revison of the best field guide for birds, The Collins Bird Guide, which I previously reviewed here. Apparently there are a number of areas where this guide is being revised, including the gulls and raptors section. I haven't been able to find any news on when the revision is supposed to be released but one note I saw thought that it might be March of this year.

I just found a reference that suggests this title will be released early in June this year.

Good Review and Great Essay

Here is a good review by Matt Mullenix at Querencia and the original article here. An essay on loneliness, solitude and the internet that is spot on.

Albatross

"I now belong to a higher cult of favored mortals, for I have seen the albatross"..."Lying on the invisible currents of the breeze, the bird appeared merely to follow its pinkish bill at random." -
Robert Cushman Murphy

I cannot have a post about albatrosses without at least one quote from Mr. Murphy. Actually I probably can't get through any post about seabirds without a quote from Murphy. He is a pioneer seabird biologist and the author of the classic, and one of my favorite books of all time, The Oceanic Birds of South America. I have a copy of this two volume set that was given to me by one of Montana's pioneering ornithologists, Clifford Davis and I treasure them for the wealth of information they contain as well as where they came from.
Murphy explored South Georgia onboard the whaling brig "Daisy" which resulted in much of the material for the Oceanic Birds of South America, but also resulted in "Logbook for Grace" a wonderful account of the trip written from his diaries (Grace was his wife's name). More recently, Murphy's daughter Eleanor Mathews wrote Ambassasor to the Penguins, an expanded account of Murphy's South Georgia adventure complete with photos Murphy took while onboard the Daisy.

The most common albatross on any voyage to Antarctica is undoubtedly the Black-browed Albatross (Thalassarche melanophris). They are like the Pintado - they arrive behind the ship before we clear the Beagle Channel and stay with us throughout most of the trip. They are suberb aeronauts, as are all the albatross, and Murphy says "Every movement revealed the constant, delicate reactions of the mechanism of balance - the gentle, almost unnoticeable rocking and seesawing of the wings with the bird's body as a fulcrum, the gauging of the angle of the wings-axis with horizon according to the sharpness of a turn and their feat of "shortening sail" at a critical moment, the last capability being due to the structural advantage of jointed planes, which man has thus far been unable to build into his imitation aircraft."
In the photo below you can see quite well the jointed planes Murphy described. The wings are so thin that when viewed head on, you can see quite well the joints projecting above the plane of the wing.









Below is an immature Black-browed Albatross.



The Gray-headed Albatross (Thalassarche chrysostoma) occurs throughout the range of the Black-browed Albatross but is much less common. They don't seem as interested in following the ship as the Black-browed either, often just showing up for a pass or two. I don't have many photos of this species and I had hoped to do better this trip. I managed to get a few photos, but I wish the light would have been better (it was overcast for most of our Drake Passage crossings, particularly when I was up and about).





Next is my favorite of the albatrosses. The Light-mantled Sooty Albatross (Phoebetria palpebrata). I once saw them described as "gentle beauty" and it resonated with me for this species. They (along with their close relative the Sooty Albatross) are the most aeronautic of all the albatrosses too. Again Murphy:
"The long tail and long slender wings of Phoebetria are associated with a type of flight which also distinguishes the two species of this genus from all other albatrosses" and "During the morning four Sooty Albatrosses joined us and remained near-by for five hours, appearing to have no other purpose than to play in the howling wind for the admiration of us on board. Their ease and precision, and particularly their ability to vary their speed and to "stand still" in the air, put them in a class by themselves."





These two joined us in a snowstorm off of Adelaide Island.






And last, but certainly not least, is one of the big guys, the Southern Royal Albatross (Diomedia epomophora epomophora). They, along with the Wandering Albatross (Diomedia elegans) have the largest wingspan of any living bird, nearly 3.5 m (11.5 feet). We didn't have many of these guys come close to the ship on this trip and so this was the only large albatross I got decent photos of. We did see a couple of Wandering Albatross too, but I don't have photos of those.