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I am so thankful for the birds at Ipswich River Wildlife Sanctuary in Topsfield. They give me a chance to connect eye to eye and bird feet to human hand. This little red-breasted nuthatch is one of those birds. Here on a tree but likely soon about to visit my hand graciously for a small seed .

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Yellow-crowed Night-Herons by Scott Dresser

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Yellow-crowed Night-Herons by Scott Dresser

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Last summer, during a vacation week on the Cape I received a rare bird alert for a Yellow-crowned Night-Heron which was spotted nearby at Audubon's Long Pasture Sanctuary.  I arrived before dawn the next morning and searched the likely fresh water ponds but, as with many rare bird searches, I came up empty.  Before leaving I was photographing Purple Martins nearby when I caught sight of a bird landing in the swampy area.  After a short walk I was treated to the show below.  Over the next hour this pair of Yellow-crown Night-Herons displayed, gathered sticks from nearby trees and began the process of nest building just above me.

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Cedar Waxwings by Ellen Gallagher Lowe (1)

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Cedar Waxwings by Ellen Gallagher Lowe (1)

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While gazing out of our kitchen window, I was recently very delighted to see a migration of about 10 cedar waxwings welcomed by the bluebirds, in West Acton.  On a sunny day, they enjoyed an hour or so of berries on branches and fresh melting snow on a barn.

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Cedar Waxwings and Eastern Bluebirds by Ellen Gallagher Lowe (2)

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Cedar Waxwings and Eastern Bluebirds by Ellen Gallagher Lowe (2)

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Cedar Waxwing &  Bluebird-c-egl_13Feb2021

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Cedar Waxwing by Ellen Gallagher Lowe (3)

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Cedar Waxwing by Ellen Gallagher Lowe (3)

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One of the most common birds around my house is the lowly house finch. Along with sparrows and starlings, they are so plentiful I tend to ignore them. However, looked at very closely, they are strikingly beautiful. This one seemed particularly pleased with himself, in his spring breeding colors. He was waiting his turn at my feeder, which was very busy that day.

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Spring 2020 was defined by the pandemic, and my birding was restricted to places close to my Acton home. One of these was the Acton Arboretum, within walking distance to my house; I birded there almost every morning from mid-April through May last year. The fruit trees near the main parking lot exit proved to be a hotspot. I captured this cedar waxwing there enjoying last year's fruit as the tree's new growth proved Spring was here.

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There is a birding Mecca in the center of Malaysia called Fraser’s Hill. It’s high enough at 4,777 ft., in relation to the area around it, to have evolved its own distinct ecosystem. It attracts birds that are unique to the area, as well as many more that are more prolific in the region. I spent several days visiting a renowned wildlife cinematographer who was running a B&B on the hill, catering exclusively to naturalists. He was semi-retired from his career of expeditions filming for the likes of the BBC and National Geographic into the jungles of southeast Asia, Madagascar, Africa and South America. This silver-eared mesia was just one of the dozens of lifer birds I had the incredible pleasure to capture while there. It was an experience of a lifetime for me.

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I paid this bluebird big bucks to sit still for long enough for me to move my tripod to line him up with the brilliant fall foliage in the background behind him. The colors were spectacular, and the sky was crystal clear. He was pretty far away, which meant I had to really crop the image, so it is not as sharp as I would have liked. This is a good illustration of why one always wants a bigger lens.

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Ruby-throated Hummingbird by Peter Norton

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Ruby-throated Hummingbird by Peter Norton

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On 9 May 2020, a male ruby-throated hummingbird spent much of the day in a Japanese maple right outside our window. It was a cold blustery day, and he probably had just arrived on migration, needing to rest. He preened his feathers, stretched his wings, and puffed out his iridescent gorget, but mostly sat and looked around and occasionally fed from the hummingbird feeder. He also blinked a lot, which I noticed as I looked through all the photos I took, like this one.

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Swamp Sparrow - Or Is It? David Sibley Made the Call!  by Simon Bunyard

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Swamp Sparrow - Or Is It? David Sibley Made the Call!  by Simon Bunyard

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Judge for yourself. What sparrow do you think this is? Bird identification is always a challenge and often the topic of great debate among birders. Photos can help, but even then there is enough variation from one individual bird to another to raise doubts. I captured this sparrow at Blackwater NWR on the east coast of Chesapeake Bay in Maryland, in March. I thought swamp sparrow, but maybe savannah sparrow?  So I did what I always do when I can’t make the call, I reached out to the Boxborough Birders for help. There was not a consensus from them, either. In fact, I got another possibility to consider, a juvie white-throated sparrow. There must have been twenty emails flying around on this. Rita reached out for help from David Larson at Mass Audubon, but he couldn’t decide either. As a newbie birder, I was feeling pretty impressed with all the interest I had stirred up among the experts. Larson sent out a request by carrier pigeon to the Guru on mountain top, David Sibley, for help. The response was classic Sibley. “I think swamp sparrow still showing some juvenile aspects to the plumage. The bright rusty wings and tail, back pattern, orangey flanks, gray head, yellowish bill, etc. are all typical swamp sparrow. It seems on the pale side overall, with sort of yellowish lores and strong streaking on the breast, but all of those things are extremely variable and this is within the range of swamp sparrow. One possible explanation: since feather color is controlled hormonally, this could be a bird that molted a lot of body feathers last fall before it was producing fully adult hormones. Those feathers would grow with a more juvenile-like pattern.” There you have it.

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One of the things wildlife photographers want to capture in their images is drama. It was the spring mating season, at Boxborough Station, and the male Canada geese were being very aggressive. This one was telling another, in no uncertain terms, stay away from my woman. I love the tongue. Doesn’t that just say it all? I wish I could have captured the racket that went with it.

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My bird feeders always seem to attract the same cast of characters: chickadees, cardinals, downies, finches. You know them well. But I had never seen a Carolina wren. In the spring of 2020, this little beauty showed up, a pair of them, actually. It was my first time capturing one of this species. That “lifer shot” is always a thrill for a wildlife photographer. These wrens are hard to capture. They flit around, and rarely sit still long enough to get the camera pointed and focused to get the shot.

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Florida, in its efforts to clean up its sewer discharge and conserve water, has devised a brilliant scheme of pumping the very clean treated effluent into large settling basins that expose it to the air and allow it to percolate back into the ground. This allows the effluent to oxygenate and recharge into the aquifer, rather than flowing into a river and being lost out to sea. It’s Florida’s version of a leaching field. They have planted grasses and trees in these basins and made perfect wetland animal habitat, very close to urban centers. And no, it doesn’t smell. With raised boardwalks throughout, they are a magnet for the local residents to observe wildlife, up close and personal. The birds get habituated to the people, which creates opportunities for very close-up viewing. The wildlife thrive in these little oases. This red-shouldered hawk was taking advantage of the abundant prey in one such oasis, the Green Cay Nature Center & Wetlands (in a moment of political brilliance, some bureaucrat came up with the idea of naming all these leaching fields as sanctuaries), just north of Boca Raton, on the Atlantic coast. I liked the way the breeze was ruffling his feathers.

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Sometimes, in photography, it all just comes together; the light is good, the composition works, the subject is cooperating, and the photographer gets the exposure right. This was one of those moments. I had been shooting images of a very active group of birds at my feeder, when I noticed a neighbor’s cherry tree, resplendent in blossoms, had some activity in it. I walked over to see this chickadee, just wallowing in the beauty. He invited me to take its portrait, and I was happy to accommodate him. I think he was pleased with the results. I know I was.

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Red-winged blackbird seen off the board walk at Parker River N.W.R.

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Maribou Stork, Serengeti (Tanzania) 2018 by Richard Fichera

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Maribou Stork, Serengeti (Tanzania) 2018 by Richard Fichera

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Big picturesque bird, impressive in flight, a scavenger that occupies the same niche as vultures. I got to watch them feeding alongside vultures on a couple of carcasses, and got some rather disgusting videos of them fighting with the vultures over various bits and pieces, but this was a more sedate vision of this magnificent and very large stork. This one liked to hang around the safari lodge, waiting, according to the cooks, for “anything he could scavenge” despite their effort to not provide a buffet for the local scavengers. He is perched in an Acacia, maybe 15 – 20 feet up.

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Great Blue Heron Nest Building by Simon Bunyard

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Great Blue Heron Nest Building by Simon Bunyard

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Hager Swamp (behind Blanchard School) has always had a great population of great blue herons, wood ducks, and tree swallows, and red-bellied woodpeckers, and many, many more. It’s a great place for birdwatching. I have spent many days just sitting behind my camera on its shoreline, watching the activity, and capturing images. It can be fascinating. One day in the spring of 2016, I noticed this great blue heron working on its nest. This particular nest appears not to be very consolidated – it’s easy to see light through most of it – so I surmise it may have been a new one this season. On one trip back to the nest with another stick, the heron landed in the nest, looked around a bit, then dropped down a succession of branches, like descending a staircase, to well below the nest, and started inserting its stick into the bottom of the nest, what you see in this image. I was clicking away the whole time. In reviewing the images later, this one seemed to capture the activity best. The heron, in its breeding plumage, neck outstretched, doing what herons do, and looking handsome the whole time.

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As the saying goes in the bird photography business, the best lens to use is a bigger one. In the early spring of 2016 I broke down and purchased a big (for me) telephoto lens. I had been testing it out for a few days and getting more comfortable with it. It was in the back of my car one day, when I was driving down Hill Rd. In the road ahead was a dead squirrel, with a red-tailed hawk sitting on it. The squirrel looked to have lost an argument up with a vehicle, but the hawk was clearly taking advantage of the situation. Remembering I had my camera in the back of the car, with my nice new lens, I slowly climbed out of my seat, keeping the door between me and the hawk, and got it out. Then, a car came around the bend ahead and scared the hawk away. I turned to follow him as he headed to an old dead tree, where to my wonder was his mate. I quickly repositioned to get a good shot of him landing, and this was the result. Thank goodness for big lenses. They are worth every penny.

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Cedar Waxwing on the Nest by David Durrant

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Cedar Waxwing on the Nest by David Durrant

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Cedar waxwing nesting in a Sorbus alnifolia (Korean Mountain Ash) on our farm.  Fledged three young.

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Red crossbill at Salisbury Beach on one of our Wednesday morning bird trips with Joppa flats.

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My first Wilson's warbler - not 6 feet off the Tank Road at Oxbow N.W.R.

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Impressive rear end of our peacock.

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While my wife Ruth and I were visiting family in Singapore a few years ago, we went to the Botanical Gardens which has a wonderful bird population, as well as beautiful horticultural specimens. This is an olive-backed sunbird, drinking nectar from a Heliconia flower. These birds are quite small, not much larger than a hummingbird. I found the two to be breathtakingly beautiful together. It is one of my favorite images.

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Grey Crowned Crane, Ngorogoro Crater (Tanzania) 2018 by Richard Fichera

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Grey Crowned Crane, Ngorogoro Crater (Tanzania) 2018 by Richard Fichera

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The national bird of Uganda, a large crane. He was just standing around in a small mud hole about 100 feet away. Hard to get a bad picture of these guys😊

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This Carolina wren just fledged from a nest on a shelf by our backdoor.  I put my hand out and he hopped on!!!

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Great Blue Heron - Groton, 2018 by Richard Fichera

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Great Blue Heron - Groton, 2018 by Richard Fichera

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I like this photo because of the backlighting. Although the backlighting washes out the color of the feathers, I like the highlights on the back and neck and the luminous light shining through the bill. I also like that it light shining off the pollen-coated water, making it look almost solid. I noticed that the local herons were usually on the well-lit Western side of our local pond in the morning, presumably to take advantage of the better light. I spent about an hour in the early morning gently stalking this guy to try and get him in the right light.

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Red-tailed Hawk Suburban Visitation by Doug Lowe (2)

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Red-tailed Hawk Suburban Visitation by Doug Lowe (2)

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Our avian guest was seemingly unconcerned about us and proceeded to hop over to another resin chair and then onto the roof of our car in the driveway next to the patio. The hawk perched on top of the car for a minute or two adjusting its position occasionally, and then turned toward us with a gaze that appeared to be a smile (this however is likely an inaccurate anthropomorphic attribution). (2/3)

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Red-tailed Hawk Suburban Visitation by Doug Lowe (3)

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Red-tailed Hawk Suburban Visitation by Doug Lowe (3)

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It then flew off to a nearby phone pole, fanning its tail feathers on the way. It was a wonderful visit from a beautiful creature. (3/3)

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Snowy owl at Parker River N.W.R. on one of our Wednesday morning birding trips with Joppa flats. All photos taken with a small Canon Powershot pocket camera.

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Red-tailed Hawk Suburban Visitation by Doug Lowe (1)

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Red-tailed Hawk Suburban Visitation by Doug Lowe (1)

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One day in August last year, we were treated to a close encounter of a Red-tailed Hawk. Looking out our kitchen window I saw a large bird swoop down onto our patio. I exited through the front door to circle back around the house so as not to disturb our visitor. It had landed on a resin patio chair and then swooped gently over to perch on a birdbath in our patio garden. My wife was taking pictures through the kitchen window. (1/3)