Bella Vista Creek

Welcome to Bird of the Day!

You might notice some recent changes to the blog. For one, the banner image above has changed from Mustang Island on the Gulf coast to a picture of a local birding spot near my house. Likewise, I plan to focus many of the upcoming posts on birding that area. On the right hand side of the page you will also see the addition of a new gadget that lists what birds have been seen in that area in the last 30 days. Further below, there is a link to ebird for more historic information about the birds seen at Bella Vista Creek. Feel free and contact me on the blog about what you think. Click on images to enlarge. (All photos by gbmcclure)

Dec 14, 2010

Hidden Crowns

The last tow days I have been attending a conference for work on the east side of town, which gives me the opportunity to run over to Hornsby Bend Bird Observatory during lunch. A pretty good deal if you don't mind eating with the flies or among the smell of a waste-water treatment facility. This area is bordered on the south by the Colorado river and goes through a section of woods and different levels and sizes of ponds before ending up in fields on the northern side. So on any given day you can see a large number and variety of bird species. Unfortunately, in the hour or so I had for lunch I could not cover each area, but still managed to see a quite a few cool birds. Perhaps the best bird I saw was one I could not get a picture of--the Common Snipe. I also saw Red-tailed Hawks to Meadowlarks, neither of which wanted their photo taken.

On the ponds I did see this Spotted Sandpiper and this male Northern Pintail.

spotted sandpiper

northern pintail

As you can tell, by the time I got out of the car and took the photo of the pintail he was well into his retreat posture and I did not have time to pretend to be aloof in order to get a better shot.

On the road leading around the ponds there were as usual a bunch of American Pipits wagging their tails up and down. I particularly like this little guy's shadow.

american pipit

Finally, as I drove down the dirt road between the southern most pond and the woods, I saw both a Ruby-crowned Kinglet and an Orange-crowned Warbler. Interestingly enough, both of these birds rarely exhibit the field marks for which they are named. The kinglets are fun because of their un-bird-like bravado in the face of strange men with cameras.

ruby-crowned kinglet

orange-crowned warbler

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