{"id":687,"date":"2009-12-30T18:51:12","date_gmt":"2009-12-31T00:51:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=687"},"modified":"2010-02-11T14:23:55","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T20:23:55","slug":"new-species-and-big-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/?p=687","title":{"rendered":"New Species! (And Big Bird)"},"content":{"rendered":"

During migration and winter we have a lot of birds in the grass–birds that fly up and dive down a little distance away, birds that fly up and perch in bushes, birds that fly up and away and dive down over there.<\/em> Most of them are sparrows of some kind.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Today one of the “divers” posed long enough for me to note salient characteristics and even get some slightly blurry pictures–good enough for an ID:<\/p>\n

\"LeConte's-sparrow159\"<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

This is a LeConte’s\u00a0 Sparrow,\u00a0 Ammodramus leconteii<\/em>. which migrates through here and also sometimes spends the winter.\u00a0 This is the first one I’ve been sure of.\u00a0 I will spare you all the difficulties I had photographing it.\u00a0 (Or putting the correct ID on the file–for some reason I had another sparrow name on the brain and wrote down the wrong one while looking at the right one.) \u00a0\u00a0 It’s a beautiful little bird; these images hardly do it justice.\u00a0\u00a0 Right after I took the last image, it dove off that twig into the\u00a0 knee-high grass below.<\/p>\n

\"LeConte's-sparrow160\"<\/p>\n

After a new species, what could I do but look at the grass in hopes of spotting something else interesting?<\/p>\n

\"knotroot-bristlegrass162\"<\/p>\n

This is knotroot bristlegrass\u00a0 (a name that’s fun to say fast), a favorite food of painted buntings.\u00a0\u00a0 It likes to grow in damper areas; here, it’s in the near meadow “drainage channel.”\u00a0 At this time of year, the seeds have fallen, leaving the bristles glowing in the slanting light.<\/p>\n

\"knotroot-bristlegrass164\"<\/p>\n

Nearby, thanks to a half inch of rain over the past couple of days, the pool below the Number 3 gabion is flowing again:<\/p>\n

\"pool-below-no3-gabion166\"<\/p>\n

I walked up past the gabion and started up the old ditch line, checking water clarity and such, and planning to look for crawdads in the largest pool in the old ditch, when–suddenly and very impressively–a great blue heron stood up in that pool, spread its vast wings and took off, flying toward the highway.\u00a0 I was so startled that I didn’t get a picture right away and my first ones were completely out of focus, but then, as it turned to parallel the highway and than come back west along the line of the natural drainage, north of the old ditch, I got some half-way decent shots:<\/p>\n

\"great-blue-heron-flight171\"<\/p>\n

You can see the guard rail of the highway behind the trees–the heron has turned parallel to the highway and is going to double back to the natural drainage, which also has various pools on it.\u00a0\u00a0 I didn’t realize the big heron hunted these little pools, mostly only a few inches deep.<\/p>\n

\"great-blue-heron-flight172\"<\/p>\n

The heron is already starting to come down and slide towards a chosen landing site.<\/p>\n

\"great-blue-heron-flight173\"<\/p>\n

And here the heron is flying just above the natural drainage channel–the trees are on the north fenceline.<\/p>\n

\"great-blue-heron-lands175\"<\/p>\n

Landing…we can’t see the water but I know it’s there and I’m sure that’s where the bird is.\u00a0\u00a0 Here’s a link to an earlier post<\/a> that shows both the ditch pool the heron left from, and the east grass pool it landed in.<\/p>\n

\"great-blue-heron-grass178\"<\/p>\n

The watcher is being watched…although this shot shows the bird slightly more relaxed than the previous, with the beak pointed right at me.\u00a0\u00a0 After standing still to take all the pictures, I turned away and opened distance between us–didn’t want to bother the heron any longer.\u00a0 I went up to the dry woods instead, to check the rain gauge at Fox Pavilion and try (unsuccessfully) to photograph a backlit Dainty Sulphur butterfly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During migration and winter we have a lot of birds in the grass–birds that fly up and dive down a little distance away, birds that fly up and perch in bushes, birds that fly up and away and dive down over there. Most of them are sparrows of some kind.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Today one of the “divers” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,7,4],"tags":[13,8,22,59,60,32,70],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography","category-plantlife","category-wildlife","tag-beauty","tag-bird-behavior","tag-census","tag-great-blue-heron","tag-lecontes-sparrow","tag-native-plants","tag-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":799,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions\/799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.80acresonline.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}