neilpa

I believe it’s a Northern Mockingbird

#386 - Ancient Murrelet! Thought it was going to be late October or November before I got one.

I dug up the checklist, figured it belongs in this thread too for such an awesome find https://ebird.org/checklist/S148902457

Yea, that’s what I figured. There’d been a number of reports of SESA at this location. However, the group of Westerns there had the most variation in bill length I’ve ever seen. I suspect there are a few mis-IDs mixed in.

Thought I had finally gotten my nemisis Semipalmated Sandpiper but looking at my photos I'm less sure. This week in Seattle SESA? WESA left, SESA right (might be same bird as above)?

The latter. I'm currently leaning Lesser

I've gone back and forth on this bird a few times. This morning in Seattle Peeps and Killdeer for scale

Only the formerly Pacific-slope Flycatcher.

Another slow summer birding day but got my first tiger beetle. Western Tiger Beetle (Cicindela oregona)

Woot!

Northern Loggerhead

American Hornet Moth (Sesia tibiale)

Surprise visitor to my feeders today (and new yard bird). Not great, but still a big upgrade over my other Black-headed Grosbeak pics. Sadly it only stayed around for a couple minutes after I noticed.

You can't assume that number of birds in a frame equates to that many birds per second. As @Charlie Spencer alludes to, you also have to take the speed of the birds into account. The corollary to his technique is to play the video in slow motion for a few seconds and count the number of birds that cross an imaginary line (e.g enter/exit the frame). That similarly gives you the number of birds per unit time that you can extrapolate with. This is the same technique that ebird recommends for moving flocks.

Cedar Waxwings were out in force at a nearby blueberry farm https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/592859151

Some old pics (with the exposure cranked up) from Oscoda County, MI in August 2020. I'm not sure what to make of these

Couple of retroactive lifers that I had misidentified when I was first getting into birding. Found these when importing some old roadtrip photos into iNat. Orchard Oriole (had down as a Yellow Warbler) Great Crested Flycatcher (had lumped these in w/ pics of an Eastern Phoebe)

Not much time for birding lately so I've been trying out macro photography around the yard. Got some cheap extension tubes for my kit lens which I'm starting to figure out. First try at a focus stack (handheld, 4 images) that turned out

D’oh. Not sure how I missed that link before.

@Seanbirds IIRC you know a thing or two about mammal IDs. In going through my backlog of pics and getting them on iNat, I've learned there are 23! species of "Western Chipmunks". Any chance you want to take a peak at these. Seems like there are only a couple options for each based on range. I wish I could find the equivalent of allaboutbirds.org for mammals, etc. Especially the comparative ID and similar species pages.

Yea. I wish there was a variant that was code 4. But even then it’s not terribly useful since you get all the checklists for the same bird.

It seems to work surprisingly well in the short time I’ve used it. I’ve uploaded a ton of flower, bug, etc pics with broad IDs. A bunch of them have been narrowed down which I would’ve struggled to figure out, even with the field guides I own.