February 21, 2012 - Texas
Photos from a week spent in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas are now online. I didn't cover too much ground on this trip - venturing only as far west as Salineño and as far east as Estero Llano Grande - but this little patch of Texas boasts a remarkable number of the Mexican specialties that draw so many birders to The Valley each winter.
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The Green Jay is the most common corvid in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, often found moving through thorn scrub and subtropical forest in noisy flocks. |
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An Altamira Oriole in Hidalgo County, Texas. The U.S. range of the Altamira Oriole is limited to South Texas. |
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The Pyrrhuloxia, also known as the Desert Cardinal, is common in the more arid regions of South Texas. This individual is perched on a Guayacan branch (Guajacum angustifolium). |
Birding South Texas isn't all about the specialties, though - The Valley is a great place to see and photograph species like the Northern Cardinal, which, though widespread in North America, is particularly abundant in the Tamaulipan thorn scrub that covers much of South Texas.
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Despite their popular association with snowflakes and holly on holiday greeting cards, Northern Cardinals are more at home in the thorn scrub of South Texas. Their northward expansion in recent decades has been enabled by the increasing prevalence of bird feeders. |
Now that Texas is behind me, I'm looking forward to heading south again next month, this time to Florida, where I hope to see more sunshine, and fewer raindrops, than I did on my last Florida trip.
January 27, 2012 - New Site Design
Welcome to Tringa 2.0. In addition to numerous aesthetic improvements, the new design should be faster and easier to navigate, and will be easier for me to maintain. I'll continue to tweak the style and streamline the code, but the basic structure is in place now.
I took a trip to South Texas earlier this month, where I had a fantastic week photographing most of the lower valley specialties. Now that the new site design is done, it's time to get back to image processing!
November 11, 2011 - Florida
Photos from a very rainy trip to Central Florida are now online in two galleries. I was happy to photograph most of the bird species I'd hoped for on my long weekend trip, in spite of the weather, but I'm looking forward to going back sometime to get birds in better plumage and better light.
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A Florida Scrub-Jay in Central Florida scrub habitat. Habitat loss continues to cause a precipitous decline in populations of this Florida endemic. |
October 17, 2011 - Alaska
I visited Alaska for the first time this June, and spent most of the month traveling through that vast and diverse state. With Anchorage as a hub, I went on three major outings, first exploring interior Alaska (Glenn, Richardson, Parks, and Denali Highways), then the Arctic tundra (Barrow), followed by a visit to a seabird colony in the Bering Sea (Saint Paul Island). In between these larger trips were a few brief forays in South-Central Alaska, including the Kenai Peninsula.
The Alaska Interior surpassed all my expectations, with spectacular mountain ranges and vast boreal forests, to say nothing of the wildlife. The Denali Highway in particular offered some of the most beautiful scenery I've ever experienced, as well as fantastic opportunities to photograph ptarmigans, warblers, and shorebirds. With usable light nearly 20 hours a day, the only challenge was finding time to sleep.
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An American Golden-Plover on alpine tundra in the Alaska Interior. |
The Arctic tundra at Barrow presented a very different landscape, with nothing but flat brown tundra stretching out to the horizon on one side, and sea ice stretching out to the North Pole on the other. Barrow is certainly one of the stranger places I've visited, but also one of the most rewarding. Within a few hours of arrival, I found myself photographing a Snowy Owl in a mid-June snowfall, just a few minutes before midnight.
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A Snowy Owl in a mid-June snowfall on the Arctic tundra in Barrow. At 320 miles north of the Arctic Circle, snow can fall in any month of the year in Barrow. |
The cloudy weather during my week in Barrow was frustrating, as I'd been dreaming of photographing the beautiful eiders, loons, and shorebirds all night long in the sweet light of the midnight sun. Only on my last evening in Barrow did I finally get to experience the midnight sun, but even then, clouds rolled in and ended my photography by 2 AM.
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The spring thaw on the tundra opens the way for a remarkable influx of ducks, geese, and loons. I photographed this Pacific Loon while lying on an ice shelf at 1 AM on my last night in Barrow. |
After a lot of weather frustration (but still some fantastic photography) in Barrow, I headed to Saint Paul Island, a location notorious for its foul weather. Here my weather luck turned around, as I got to experience several calm days with little fog, and clouds light enough that the sun was able to poke through on a few occasions. These were great conditions for getting photos of the beautiful and fascinating puffins, auklets, murres, fulmars, cormorants, and kittiwakes that breed on the cliffs of Saint Paul and the other Pribilof Islands.
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A Horned Puffin on a cliff edge on Saint Paul Island - just one among millions of seabirds breeding on the Pribilofs. |
The second half of my stay on Saint Paul was more typical for the island, with howling wind and frequently impenetrable fog. The weather was bad enough that my flight back to Anchorage was postponed by a day, giving me a bit more time to explore that fascinating little island and enjoy its distinctive wildlife. Among the most intriguing denizens to me was the Pribilof Islands race of the Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch, which weighs in at about twice the size of the rosy-finch races found on the mainland.
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The Pribilofs race of the Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch is markedly larger and darker than the mainland races. These finches are common residents in the town of Saint Paul, nesting under the eaves of many houses and buildings, as well as in cinder quarries and on the sea cliffs. |
Combined with some terrific songbird sessions in the mid-Atlantic and Appalachian forests this spring, my Alaska trip capped a fantastic three months of photography. Photos from the trip are linked from my latest photos page.
September 3, 2011 - Mid-Atlantic
Photos from several trips to coastal Maryland, Delaware, and New Jersey last winter are now posted.
August 31, 2011 - Spring in Virginia and West Virginia
I spent most of the weekends in April and May photographing songbirds in the beautiful forests of Virginia and West Virginia, and photos from these outings are now posted in three new galleries.
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A Chestnut-sided Warbler on a Red Spruce branch in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. |
February 27, 2011 - Redpolls
I took a four-day weekend last week to travel to Ontario in search of Hoary Redpolls. Photos from the trip are now posted in a new gallery. The Hornemann's race, which breeds in Greenland and on Baffin and Ellesmere Islands, was my main target. Hornemann's Hoary Redpolls are significantly larger and frostier than the more common and widespread Exilipes race of Hoary Redpoll. I did have some success, managing usable photos of a first-winter female Hornemann's Hoary Redpoll, though this individual doesn't exhibit the frosty look of an adult male Hornemann's. While this was the only Hornemann's bird I found, I did have the opportunity to photograph several Exilipes Hoary Redpolls, as well as Common Redpolls.
January 16, 2011
I continued my streak of good weather luck in the Pacific NW recently, with four beautiful sunny days spent mostly working on waterfowl on Vancouver Island and in Oregon. Photos from the trip are now posted in three new galleries. I've also posted some photos from last winter, most of which were taken in Virginia during the Snowpocalypse and Snowmageddon blizzards, in two new galleries.