BirdingGirl

I was on the Cape this past weekend for Thanksgiving and although my mother's birdfeeders were empty there were still plenty of birds around. I saw numerous chickadees in the backyard flitting around among the oak trees and in the front yard I saw a male cardinal, junco and a red-breasted nuthatch. It's rare to me to see a single junco since they usully come in flocks and always when it snows. It got pretty cold this weekend though- we had consecutive days of below-freezing temperatures for the first time, so the junco wasn't a complete surprise. But again, I'm not used to seeing them alone. The red-breasted nuthatches have to be my new favorite bird to watch while I'm home. I've seen them in my parents' yard during my past few visits. What usually alerts me to their presence is their unique squeaking chatter. It's obviously much like that of the white-breasted nuthatch but since I know theirs so well I can tell when it's the other bird. My friend C...

I've made a few trips to Blue Hills lately but unfortunately I don't have any bird pictures to share! I have some great ones of a garter snake, a deer, and some pretty foliage but no birds :( I may post those in the next few days once work dies down a bit.

I used the website Spiderzrule.com to research the spider I saw at Gifford Pinchot State Park. It was great because it featured user-submitted photos which allows for multiple views of different spiders and aids in identification. I decided to submit my photos since I thought they would be helpful/interesting for the website's visitors to see. Here's a link to the live pictures: http://www.spiderzrule.com/orbweaver11.htm

I was also able to get some great pictures of a Walking Stick and a large spider (turns out it's a Marbled Orb Weaver spider) while camping at Gifford Pinchot. The Walking Stick was especially exciting because neither my boyfriend nor I had ever seen one in real life. This one was missing a leg, but apparently they can grow them back after several successive molts. I also learned that they remain hanging motionless during the day waiting until it gets dark so they can go out and feed. That makes a lot of sense because he barely moved from the small bush where we left him. We can back from our hike and he was still in the same spot. I also learned that the females can lay a batch of female-only eggs in the event that there are no males around to breed with. We initially encountered him trapped underneath the rainfly of our tent. I pulled back the rainfly (after grabbing my camera of course) and he was free to move around. I picked him up from here to move him: Next I moved him onto...

I snapped this picture of a bird at the Museum of Natural History in New York. I just tried doing a little research on my own to see what it is but didn't have any luck. I should have just stopped to read the label on the exhibit but we were moving really quickly through it at that point and it just didn't occur to me. Let me know if you can identify it, or if you have any ideas about how to research it. The long feather coming out of the crown is the most unique aspect of it but I've had trouble describing it.

Finally I was able to get out and do some birding this past weekend. It was great to spend some time outdoors and also to get some good pictures. Thursday and Friday my boyfriend and I were in Vermont visiting his friends and then Friday afternoon we took the ferry from Charlotte, VT over to Essex, NY and cut down to PA for my college homecoming. We really lucked out with weather and had great driving weather and warm temperatures throughout our trip. The last two days of our trip we left up in the air and after pondering our next move over some craft beers in my college town we picked Gifford Pinchot State Park since there was a camping icon on the map. Oh that and the fact that it was the closest state park to Field of Screams , in Mountsville, PA! My boyfriend found a brochure for it in Sheetz and decided we had to go. It turned out to be pretty impressive. It's a strange feeling to be out in rural PA and then drive up to a such a sophisticated haunted house- it was like a c...

I was going through a new book I borrowed from my parents. It's called Water and Marsh Birds of the World written by Oliver Luther Austin and illustrated by Arthur Stinger (1967). There are lots of copies available still, found on Amazon.com and similar sites. While I was flipping through the pages I was caught offguard by the image of the Shoebill, which the book calls a "Whalehead" and classifies as a type of stork. I did some more research on Wikipedia and it explains that it's been a difficult bird to classify. Although previously thought to be related to the stork, now apparently it's closer to the Pelicans or the Herons. Here's the image used on Wikipedia The Oliver Austin book contains some interesting information about how the bird: it averages around 4 feet tall and it's bill is able 8 inches long. Its range is the papyrus swamps of the upper White Nile River and its tributaries into East Africa. Its bill has been adapted to poking around in the ...