Birds!

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Beautiful plumage. very pretty ducks . Am glad maybe you have new residents at your pond.

If you build it, they will come.

Thousands of Elegant Tern eggs destroyed by two careless drone pilots. This was so unnecessary.

"Roughly 2,000 elegant tern eggs were destroyed after terrified adult sea birds abandoned them in the wake of a drone crash. The Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve, located in California's Orange County, is home to over 800 species of animals that rely on the 1,000+ acre wetland for solace. Along with dogs and bikes, drones are strictly prohibited. That didn't prevent two reckless remote pilots from flying their drones over the nesting area, crashing, and causing unprecedented carnage."

Elegant Terns

Bolding mine.

That's tragic. Some people are a waste of space.

Pictures of the abandoned site here:
https://twitter.com/BolsaChicaCon/statu ... 9422276608


An Elegant Tern - at Bolsa Chica:

crime against nature .

The local grey wagtail pair have bred- the yellow-breasted adults now have a monochrome juvenile in tow.

Belted kingfisher swooped over the pond this morning. They sure make a lot of noise. As do the pair of pileated woodpeckers who make their home in our area.

We did put up a wood duck nesting box. The pair flew in and looked it over and that was the last we saw of them. Maybe another year.

A green heron preening in a sun beam.

Blue jays, red cardinals, and woodpeckers!

Saw a pair of pied wagtails right outside the window at work on Wednesday. They're not an unusual bird here, but it was a rare happy moment in an otherwise horrible day.

The right bird at the right time sometimes can do wonders for a persons mindset

The pair of pileated woodpeckers has been making a lot of noise and flying around mornings and evenings where I live.

A larger woodpecker, the Ivory Billed Woodpecker has not been seen, for sure, in decades and has now been declared officially extinct. You can know they are probably gone, even though some still search in the Louisiana bayous, it is harder to maintain hope once extinction has been officially declared.

There was an even larger woodpecker, the Imperial Woodpecker; two feet tall, that used to live in the Sierra Madre mountains in Mexico. Apparently they lived only in very old growth forests, which have for the most part been cut down. I also read they were hunted for food. And get this, when a hunter would shoot one bird, the other birds (they are apparently communal) would come to look to see what was going on, sitting on branches making outstanding targets.

As I was watching the pileated woodpeckers, I was grateful they have learned to tolerate at least some human intervention.

We call the pileated woodpeckers “Good Gods”.Supposedly after you see how large they are.
There is a good documentary on the Ivory bill.I’d like to think there was a pair out there but it’s just wishful thinking.
https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/28/movies/28ghost.html

The crows have really been cutting up here.

Yes. The ivory bill is the holy grail of American birders because it officially extinct, but some hold out hope that it still may live in the depths of the old growth forests of the lower mississippi american south. The American equivalent of t the Tasmanian wolf, or thylacine. Looks much like the pileated but is even bigger.

Always such a shocking thing to read.
To think that, after millions of years evolution, one unique progression ends here and now with us - and probably as a result of us. ("us" being humankind generally).

The vast majority of all species to have ever lived have become extinct. Eventually we will too.