Bird Watching!

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:)

Oh, I have had worse wrecks.

Looks worse than it is, uh, you know the camera adds 20 pounds....of weeds.

Since I have been on this new farming kick we have been grazing most of it. Just could not graze this particular field.
 
I love those phalaropes, too.
The way they paddle around in little circles.

I was just fitted with bifocal glasses last week ( Growing old sure is fun!) but even with those on, I can't tell those cranes from the specks of dirt on the windshield.
 
For years now been plenty Turkey Vultures here , beautiful flyers yet ugly up close. New thing now is Black Vultures moving here from points South , bigger and quite unafraid of Humans if there's something dead to eat.
 
I stopped on the side of the road to look at what I thought was turkeys in a old corn field. I was looking into the sun at them so it was hard to make out detail. It was a group of turkey vultures. I could see in the sun that they are constantly dripping saliva. Made them even uglier somehow.
 
I'm not a birder, but Cool thread here for sure.

2 quick turkey vulture anecdotes: They are very common here in suburbia which is a little surprising to me because they are such big birds living on carrion, sure there are patches of woods here but still surprising those woods hold enough dead food to keep the vultures common. Yesterday driving along a woodsy 4 lane highway I saw one perched in a tree with its wings spread wide, making it look particularly large. I'm not sure what the behavior means but I hadn't seen it in vultures before, have seen it in diving sea birds before, seems like they are drying out and/or absorbing heat from the sun.

Back in the day when I was working as a forester marking trees for logging in CT, there were some trees growing out of an area of large ledges/boulders that needed to be marked. I squirted the paint mark on one side of a particular tree and when I moved to the opposite side to paint the second mark I suddenly heard a very loud hissing sound coming from a large crevice in the ledge the tree was growing out of . I looked down into the crevice and straight into the very "ugly" face of a vulture 6' from me in the bottom of the crevice. It absolutely startled the shit out of me, cool experience though!
 
Just this morning I heard a bird call I haven't heard before. Recorded it on iPhone. Went online to try to ID it. While there heard a lot of bird calls that I am familiar with and can ID, never really realized how many calls I know, 15 of them. Anyway I couldnt find this new, 4-note call online. Do any of you folks have a good online bird call id site?

thanks.
 
Funny buzzard story Cory! You're right, those on the roost with their wings spread are drying out and getting ready to fly. My show up was under a 300' microwave tower for a lot of years and it was the main roost site of black and turkey vultures for many miles, in the winter time they numbered in the hundreds. A nasty, stinking place. I had to climb the tower many times to replace bulbs and it was horrible. The platforms were covered with about three inches of regurgitated remains of everything indigestible, the ladder and everything else (including the parking lot and any vehicles under the tower) were coated with the white splatter that is their droppings and of course by the time you got back to the ground, you were too. The company tried many remedies with no success. Finally, completely disgusted from having splatter bombs dropped on him, one of my coworkers shot one off the tower, I climbed about halfway up, tied him from a cross brace by his feet and they literally disappeared overnight. Until he completely rotted away, they would not roost there. We used this technique for several years until a foreman stopped us and despite all the noise makers they've installed, the phony plastic buzzards and every thing else they've tried, the buzzards are back. In droves!
 
Interesting story, Ray.

Thanks for the link ideas.
 
FWIW vultures also soar on the up drafts .Another tid bit ,the mercaptan,an additive in natural gas use for detection of leaks attracts vultures .Natural gas is oderless BTW .The spotter air planes that fly the pipe lines are always on the look out for vultures enmass around the pipe line locations ,it smells to them like something dead .
 
I remember finding an albatross in the hanger bay during foul weather. It was about dead or worn out. I put it in a box and showed my fellow shipmates, spreading the wings - amazing. I left the box on an open sponson... don't remember whatever happened to the poor critter. I like to think it recovered and flew on...
 
I think everyone has seen this.

<iframe width="420" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/apX0WlWNGBw" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

This one didn't do quite as well. It's from a movie BROTHERS OF THE WIND.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fgdc7OlMUBI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
 
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