My Twitter Feed

March 29, 2024

Headlines:

No Time for Tuckerman -

Thursday, August 3, 2023

The Quitter Returns! -

Monday, March 21, 2022

Putting the goober in gubernatorial -

Friday, January 28, 2022

Return of Bird of the Week: Black-faced Ibis

Black-faced Ibis, Tierra del Fuego National Park, South America

Tierra del Fuego is the largest island at southernmost tip of South America. Like most island ecologies, it has been heavily impacted by humans, but many of the native birds still occur. One of them is the Black-faced Ibis. The black-faced ibis is mainly found in southern South America, ranging throughout most of southern and central Argentina and Chile. It’s certainly colorful. While the Peruvian population is likely extirpated, it’s still pretty common elsewhere in it historic range. Ornithologists get cranky when you ask about this species. It’s not well-studied, there’s a lot of disagreement about subspecies and classification with its…

Return of Bird of the Week: Southern Giant Petrel

Nesting Southern Giant Petrel, South Georgia Island, Southern Ocean

A warning: this one is a little gruesome, and there are photos that some may find offensive. You’ve been warned. This is  Southern Giant Petrel, by any measure a big bird. More than three feet long and with a wingspan of nearly seven feet, this 11 pound bird is another top-tier predator in the Southern Ocean. Note the naricorns, the tube-like structure on top of the bill. It’s part of the mechanism these birds use to expel excess salt. They don’t need fresh water; they can live on salt water. The bird’s suspicious stare is for a Brown Skua considering raiding…

Return of Bird of the Week: Brown Skua

Brown Skua Nesting Pair, South Georgia Island, Southern Ocean

The Skua is the bad boy of the Southern Ocean. Egg stealer, penguin chick grabber, bully, carrion eater, kleptoparasite; by human standards, this is a bad bird. They work in pairs to steal Gentoo Penguin eggs, with one distracting the penguin and the other stealing the egg. They are smart, skilled predators. But in the hour or so that WC watched this particular Gentoo colony, no Skua raid was successful. The taxonomy of Skuas is hotly disputed. Some ornithologists have as many as three species; other insist that all Skuas are subspecies of the Great Skua. Certainly there were color…

Return of Bird of the Week: Antarctic Prion

Antarctic Prion, South Orkney Islands, Southern Ocean

If you know the word “prion” at all you probably think of a mis-folded protein that causes neurodegenerative diseases. But it’s also a small family of seven petrel-like species, the largest of which is the Antarctic Prion. The white belly, white eyebrow, black tail tip and distinctive dark “M” shape on the back make it a pretty easy ID. Slightly smaller than petrels like the Cape Petrel, they are zooplankton and krill specialists. Their bill is adapted to filter-feeding, and they have a gular pouch like a mini-whale to assist in that filter-feeding. In flight, they are even more aerobatic…

Return of Bird of the Week: Cape Petrel

There are whole families of smaller birds, ranging from crow-sized to sparrow-sized, that spend their whole lives on the ocean, coming ashore only to breed. Petrels, Prions, Storm-petrels, Diving-petrels; they are all adapted to live on the ocean, with no need for fresh water. One of those smaller marine birds is the Cape Petrel, in Spanish the Pintado or Painted Petrel. It is probably the most common bird species on the Southern Ocean, and the easiest to see because it is an enthusiastic ship-follower. Their wings are a little under three feet long but the birds are only fifteen inches…

Return of Bird of the Week: Striated Caracara

Striated Caracara, New Island, Falkland Islands

In the Falkland Islands, the ecological role of ravens, crows and vultures is occupied by a falcon, the Striated Caracara. This is one of the larger members of the falcon family, with a wingspan of about four feet. And you can see those talons aren’t anything you’d want to mess with. In the Falkland Islands, where WC saw this species, they are called Johnny Rook, a nod to the Rook, a species of Eurasian Crow, that occupies a similar ecological niche. Intelligent, fearless and curious, WC’s problem photographing this bird was that the bird kept walking towards him, too close…

Return of Bird of the Week: Wandering Albatross

Wandering Albatross, Southern Ocean

Measured by wingspan, it’s the largest bird in the world. An adult male can be 12 feet, wing tip to wing tip. This female was small, probably 10 to 10.5 feet as she flew across the path of our boat. Unlike some other species, Wandering Albatrosses don’t seem to follow ships. Perhaps they learned a lesson from that mariner the Samuel Coelridge wrote about. Watching this big girl fly by she seemed Cessna-sized. She was within binocular view for maybe 10 minutes; she never once flapped her wings. Wandering Albatross breed every other year, and don’t nest until they are…

Return of Bird of the Week: Light-mantled Sooty Albatross

Light-mantled Sooty Albatross

A smaller member of the albatross family, the Light-manted Sooty Albatross (sometimes called the Light-mantled Albatross) is another circumpolar species. The species is “small” only in relation to other albatrosses. With a wingspan of six to seven feet and a weight of as much as eight pounds, the bird is larger than  Golden Eagle and much, much more aerobatic. There are only about 58,000 birds remaining, and the species is in decline. Another victim of long-line fishing, their situation is worsened by their very slow reproductive rates. On average, birds only begin breeding when they are 8 to 15 years old,after…

Return of Bird of the Week: Black-browed Albatross

Black-browed Albatross, West Island, Falkland Islands

So we go from a few weeks of birds that cannot fly, to birds that can only barely land, the albatrosses. The Black-browed is a medium-sized member of the albatross family, with a wing span of seven to eight feet. This bird lives in the air, landing on the ocean only when the wind dies, something that doesn’t happen often in the Southern Ocean. It comes to land only to breed. It is a magnificent flier and an enthusiastic ship-follower. WC watched the birds from the stern of his ship as they pirouetted across the sky, flying fractions of an…

Return of Bird of the Week: Humboldt Penguin

Humboldt Penguin, Pucasana Island, Peru

Most folks think of penguins as Antarctic birds. And, for the most part, they are. But like most things involving birds, there are exceptions to every rule. For penguins, one exception is the Humboldt Penguin, which ranges within a few degrees south of the equator. All of the Humboldt Penguins WC has seen and photographed have been from a small boat bouncing in the waves and chop off the coast of South America. So the photos aren’t all that wonderful. As you might guess from its appearance, it’s a cousin to the Magellanic Penguin that was featured last week. The…