Quick Denver trip last weekend

I flew to Denver, Colorado April 10th, and back home again on the 12th (well, actually, because of flight delays I arrived home at 2:30 am on the 13th). We had been having beautiful springtime weather in Ohio, but there was a bit of snow that had just fallen in Colorado - 8 inches in some areas. This is the view I had at the hotel where I stayed for the two nights I was in town.









Friday morning was for a quick trip to the Denver Botanic Garden to pull some specimens of Penstemon and representatives of Scrophulariaceae s.l. for some workshops I would be leading the next day for the Colorado Native Plant Society.

I had not been here before, and so it was fun to see the place.





It's a relatively new facility and it looked very modern. There were hundreds of school kids arriving as we finished the work in the herbarium.







Here's a view of the atrium area of the building.

I gave a talk at University of Colorado, Denver for the biology department at noon and then met with faculty and students for the rest of the afternoon. My host was Leo Bruederle, and he brought me in to visit with his students who are working on Penstemon.


My workshops were scheduled to start at 9 am on Saturday. Leo is an early riser and I was on east coast time, so we organized to meet very early so we could go do some birding at Cherry Creek State Park. The first bird of the day was a life bird for me - Western Meadowlark. I know I've seen this species when I was a kid growing up in Oregon, but I wasn't keeping a list back then.

The song is similar, but distinctly different from the Eastern Meadowlark (pic posted a couple of weeks ago).




AHV alert!


This was the start of an interesting display behavior that began when I approached too near this Killdeer. It might have been near its nest, but I couldn't tell for sure.






The bird fanned its tail feathers and wagged its tail for several minutes.










It pretty much kept its back to me the entire time.











After a few minutes, it quit doing that behavior and then just kept its eye on me. I always thought killdeers were rather plain, but in their fresh plumage I think they are very pretty.








The reservoir was chock full of aquatic fowl, including white pelican, hooded merganser (shown here), western grebe, pied-bill grebe, American coot, Canada goose, mallards, and California gulls.








This gull was all tangled up in fishing line. I felt pretty bad for it.











Here's a juvenile California gull.











American White Pelican. I have no idea why that growth is on the upper bill - most of the pelicans looked like this.











Lots of American coots were on the water.









I did two workshops for CONPS - one on the break up of Scrophulariaceae, and a second one on my Penstemon research.

L to R: Leo Bruederle, Lorain Yeats, Carol English.

Look's who's coming for breakfast

I've been pretty busy all this month, but I found a couple of minutes to start processing some pictures I took Apr 2, 2008. There was a juvenile Cooper's Hawk scoping out our backyard feeders.

We feed a nice variety of birds (cardinals, house finches, goldfinches, song sparrows, yellow-throated sparrows, Eastern Towhee, grackles, blue jays, red-bellied woodpecker, downy woodpecker, northern flicker, mourning dove, robins, carolina wren, and many more). We noticed this winter that we're also feeding Cooper's hawks - one snatched a goldfinch from the feeder only about four feet from where I was watching.





Two additional views:

I can't resist posting this one.

AAW Sphere Project

This is my contribution to the AAW sphere exhibit. All photos are by Jerry Anthony.

The title of the piece is a quote from Lao Tzu:

"When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be."

I think this quote encompasses the idea I had to make my sphere resemble an imaginary propagule of some sort.



Redwood burl, 4.5 inches diameter










Detail picture.

The entire project, post lathe, was carved using my NSK-Z500. What a gem of a tool!

Glacier Ridge Meadowlarks

The last day of spring break was Easter Sunday. We took Emma for a walk and did some casual birding. It was cold and windy and very late in the day, but I wanted to test some different camera settings to see if I could get a better focus at long distance.

By avoiding the convenient presets and setting my AF to one specific dot, I was able to improve the focus quite a bit - especially on things that aren't moving. I also changed the ISO from 100 to 400 for the low light conditions.




We saw and heard about 10 Eastern Meadowlarks toward the end of our walk. They were hard to spot unless they were facing us, but this fellow gave us quite a show.








He was quite a long ways away, but I was able to get a focused picture. The meadowlarks perch on a little tussock of grass and sing a beautiful melody.








You can see how hard it would be to find this against the grass unless he's facing you.









There were a lot of red-winged blackbirds singing around the park, also.

Their epaulettes are very bright right now.

Birding at Hoover Reservoir

Spring break is ending today, and I enjoyed taking some time off from my office. I spent the week recovering from a very busy winter quarter, and I enjoyed doing activities other than teaching, grading, and lecture prep. The weather hasn't been particularly nice, but at least I had some time at home. On Friday afternoon, after Steve got off work, the weather looked a bit nicer, and so Steve, Meghan and I hopped in the car to go up to Hoover Reservoir to check out the birds. Someone had been reporting a red-throated loon, and that was enough of an excuse to get out and see what was on the lake. We didn't see the red-throated, but I did score a new life bird from spotting a pair of common loons by the dam. They were too far away to photograph, but we had a beautiful view of them in our scope.




There were a lot of gulls at the reservoir - Bonaparte's, as shown here and in the next couple of pics, and ring-billed.













































We saw a lot of horned grebes, red-breasted mergansers, hooded mergansers, coots, ring-necked ducks, lesser scaups, pied-billed grebes, and canada geese, plus a few bufflehead ducks near the dam.

This horned grebe was grappling with a fish that looked way too big for it to swallow, but it did eventually get it down.






The fish looked to be larger than the grebe's mouth and throat.











It made me wonder how often these birds eat fish of this size, and how often do they eat? It seems as is this fish would provide enough food for a day, but I don't think that's the way it works.









Meghan wasn't interested in birds, but she did enjoy the scenery. She took a lot of photos with her digital camera.









We've had a lot of rain and snow recently, and big floods in southern and western Ohio. I don't recall seeing this much water over the spillway in the past several years.







After our stop at the dam, we drove up to Oxbow Road - another favorite birding spot for seeing waterfowl. At this location we saw a flock of 100+ red-breasted mergansers. They were kind of far off in the water, so my pics aren't very good, but you can see the field marks pretty well.







I enjoyed watching them take off for flight. They run across the water before getting enough momentum to fly.








There was a lot of courtship going on out there on the water, also.










Here was the second life bird on my list from this trip: Greater Scaup. I think I've probably seen these before, but I always error on the side of caution and call them lesser scaup. However, the field marks here are pretty clear - much more rounded head as compared to the lesser scaup, very white sides, and robust bill. Lesser Scaup have more of a peak on their crowns, and their sides are more grayish white than bright white.



The other interesting sighting of the day was the huge numbers of turkey vultures. One of the kettles of vultures we saw had several dozen birds circling. This pic shows only a subset of the turkey vultures in this kettle. They're in their migration right now, but it was pretty amazing to see so many at once. There had been a report of black vultures mixed in with the turkey vultures, but we didn't spot any of the black ones.

Birding at Whetstone park

The weather warmed up a bit on Sunday and so Steve and I took Emma on a walk at Whetstone. We stopped at the bird feeder to see if there was any action going on, and there were a lot of birds taking advantage of the nicer weather. I also tried out my new camera and lens - a Canon Rebel XTi and 300 mm zoom with IS.




Northern Cardinal













A pair of them.













Carolina Chickadee













White-breasted nuthatch











Chickadees putting on a display











This time of year they have plenty to say.











Red-belly woodpecker













Hmmmmm - the beavers are coming up from the river to munch on some trees.

EEOB Birding on March 2, 2008

The fourth EEOB birding trip occurred on a weekend when the weather was in the 60's, and a week before the Blizzard of 2008. We went to The Wilds, and it was a glorious day for birding - blue skies, lovely temperature, lots of mud and melting snow, animals galore, and a wonderful selection of birds.




Our first stop yielded a nice herd of American Bison, silhouetted against the blue sky.










We also spotted our first raptors of the day - Red-tailed Hawks, Northern Harriers, Rough-legged Hawks, and American Kestrels were abundant throughout the day. We also spotted Short-eared Owls late in the afternoon.







Our first stop yielded Horned Larks as well - a life bird for me (as was the Rough-legged Hawk).









I've always been the driver when horned larks have been spotted in previous field trips, so I was really happy to be able to stop and get a good look at this couple.









We stopped at a nice overlook and had a wonderful show of rough-legged hawks. You could also see a variety of ungulates across the valley.








The raptors put on quite a show.












The spotting scopes were put to good use, and you can get a feel for the large turnout we had for the day - a four car caravan.










The Eastern Blue Birds are showing great color this time of year. We saw a pair along the fence line.










One of the deer species at the reserve.













Killdeers were all over the place, too.












We spotted owls at our last stop of the day.










A souvenir from the day - my van looked like it had traveled on very muddy roads. The rains washed it away the next day, so no worries on getting it off.