I'm back - Great Gray Owls

After having both lungs full of blood clots, spending a week in the hospital and eight weeks in bed at home, I have finally been cleared to enjoy hiking, photos and birding.  I will go back to teaching school on March 3.  That gives me three more weeks to heal and get in shape to punish those kids.

Yesterday I found two Great Gray owls and today I found a total of four.  The recent cold weather (minus 17) and then two days of snow appears to have brought them down to the river bottoms.  Here are a few shots of these beautiful birds.

Here one shakes the whole body as if it was a dancer.

Flying over a meadow, this Great Gray locates a rodent.

After it swallows the rodent whole, it flies right past me and lands in a tree just 20 feet from me.

Blessed with two sets of eye lids, this one blinks the clear eye lids that appears to be blue contacts.

This Great Gray is taking a bath cleaning one feather at a time.  If a feather came out while being cleaned, the feather was eaten.

A royal predator. After watching them from seven hours in two days and shooting over 2000 photos, I learned a lot about the Great Grays and plan on spending more hours with them.

Just a couple more wild days in Idaho and looking for a lot more.

Market Lake

Saturday I traveled to Market Lake to see if the cold night brought in some birds.  I was not disappointed.  About 20 American Avocets were working the shallows.

 

 

There were a mixed flock of about 50 sandpipers and dowitchers.  Here a Pectoral Sandpiper joins a couple of Long-billed Dowitchers.

 

I got a kick watching a Long-billed Dowitcher bathing.  It was hilarious.

 

A Northern Harrier attack a bunch of shorebirds and I caught this Long-billed flying low enough to drag a wing in the water.

 

Enjoying another day in the wildness of Idaho.  With a day off from teaching tomorrow, I will be back out somewhere - Probably Market Lake to see if I can find some different birds.

This week I went after a load of firewood in Island Park when I saw a Clarks Nutcracker fly into a fir tree.  I grabbed my camera and found not only one in the Douglas fir tree, but about 30 in three trees that were loaded with cones.  Due to the hot dry weather this summer many fir trees are coneless.  I watched as they would grab the cones at their base and twists them off the limb.

 

 

Then most of the birds would take the cones into the interior of the tree, wedge the cone in a crook of the limb and then hammer the cone with a wicked large bill.

 

After loosening the cone, the Nutcracker would pick the seeds out, depositing them in a pouch under their tongue.

 

After filling the pouch, they would pick another cone and off they would fly to deposit the cone and the seeds in a cache on a nearby ridge.

 

Just another day of wildness in the wilds of Idaho.

Death at Market Lake WMA

Last week I drove out to Market Lake WMA for a short time but saw this mess.  A farmer had discarded his twine from his hay that he had fed his cows and left it laying everywhere.  It was all over the ground along with other garbage.  A pair of ospreys had used the twine in building their nest and one of the chicks had become tangled in some of the twine and fell from the nest where it died.

 

So I am encouraging everyone who feeds livestock to dispose of the twine in a burn barrel and burn it so this does not happen.  It was a waste of a beautiful bird.

 

 

 

 

Sorry the pictures are sideways, but don't know how to correct them.

 

 

I also met this wonderful marsh wren as it tried to visit me inside my blind.

 

Another day in the wilds of Idaho.