I begun my day again, and started THE BIGGEST WEEK IN AMERICAN BIRDING, in the MallardLake parking lot (Oak Openings), where pretty soon yesterday’s male Cerulean Piped up and began calling. Bins were all pointed skyward and amazingly Michael Retter quickly picked his gleaming white unders up, as he sung his lungs out from the top of a tree. More incredible still was when we both managed to get him lined up in the ‘scope for all. A walk along the road produced some cute Field Sparrows, and an interesting Blue-winged Warbler, whose yellow-tinged wing bars betrayed “dodgy” parentage somewhere along the line. After a frustratingly long wait we finally got crackerjack looks at several hulking Lark Sparrows around the sand dunes, and further along still a male Summer Tanager, a pair of Pine Warblers (photo), and an Eastern Towhee all gave themselves up.
A brief period on the Magee Marsh boardwalk in the afternoon got me this Kentucky Warbler creeping through the garlic mustard (bottom photo)…
A pair of tits (Blue and Great) in a London park 30 years back changed my life; I became a birder, and an obsessive birder by the following weekend. Works like Bill Oddie's Little Black Bird Book and Richard Millington's A Twitcher's Diary helped in no small part to nurture this in my formative years.
30 years on I am still an avid birder but have also learnt to appreciate other sectors of the natural world, especially frogs and primates in particular, through the undoubted influence of David Attenborough The Great and others. I now work as a full-time professional tour leader for Tropical Birding Tours, and now reside in the Andes of Ecuador. I love my job, sharing birds with people provides every bit of a buzz as a lifebird, which, of course, still creates a wave of excitement every time. I have been lucky enough to see well over 6550 bird species on my travels, which does not make me any more talented than anyone else, just one that is always greedy and impatient for more, which has taken me to all seven continents, and always yearning for that ONE...MORE...B-I-R-D!
I use Swarovski binoculars & scope, & shoot with Canon 7D and Canon 400m f5.6L lens.
1 comment:
Lucky boy! I want that Kentucky Warbler! I have yet to see one, it would be a life bird for us.
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