lonestranger

It's been proven that people have a negative effect on the populations of many species..... Killing off innocent wildlife to make up for our logging mistakes is a weak argument to support wildlife management. Sorry, but we don't know how to log without endangering many species, and I think it's wrong to put the consequences of our actions on the lives of innocent birds and call it wildlife management as if we know what we're doing.

Welcome to Whatbird @Sheri. Nice photos of the Pine Warbler. For future reference, you'll probably get a quicker response, and more of them, if you post in the North American ID forum. I believe that iBird links directly to this "iBIRD ONLY" forum, but this exclusive forum does not get as much traffic as the North American ID forum. Just saying that you don't have to use this forum, the same birders will respond here, it's just that most of the members frequent (hang out in) the North American ID forum and dont always see posts in this forum right away.

I believe they call that, (pukes the words out) "wildlife management" . Unfortunately there are people that think that they know how nature is suppose to work better than nature itself and try to influence the natural flow of things to suit their vision of nature. Killing off one species to save another species is not wildlife management, it is wilddeath management. I know there are those that support the idea and view the culling of wildlife as a corrective action. I view the culling of wildlife as a crime against nature, and obvious proof that wildlife management is an oxymoron that doesn't work.

BRDL 35 ???? ???? ????

When you start out with a 45 MP image that's 8256 x 5504 pixels, you have a lot of room for cropping. The better your lens, camera, and skill, the more you can crop.

That little, tiny fish is hardly worth getting my feet wet.

BRDL 34 ???? ???? ???? ???? ????

Extra photos might help.

If there's more footage, I haven't seen it. There's a good chance that the predator found a meal while the birds were still in the air, eliminating any need to visit the dead birds on the ground. That's pure speculation though, as is the predator theory.

I think someone's been spiking their coffee a little too much this morning. ☕

BRDL 33 ???? ???? ???? ????

Who knew that scratching my armpit wingpit with this branch would have such an artistic effect.

My first guess is usually a local bird I am familiar with. I just pick one off the top of my head that has what I'll refer to as helpful letters in the code. If none of the letters are helpful, I just make another wild guess of familiar birds until I find a letter and it's proper placement. The next day I try to think of a different bird with helpful letters in the code and start the guessing game again. Once i start getting a few letters, that's when they start becoming educated guesses with strategic purposes. The more letters I get and the more I find the right place for, the sooner I get to that last lucky guess. That's when I convince myself that my skill had something to do with getting that last guess right. ?

Letter - count of letter as first-fourth letter, overall percentage Thanks chipperati, your chart shows just how unlikely our guesses really are. It also shows that for some letters my extreme example of 1% to 99% wasn't all that extreme after all.

That's the type of strategy I was referring to. I try to eliminate groups of birds with my opening guesses too. I like to mix it up differently every day though.

Definitely a game of LUCK! BRDL 32 ???? ???? ????

I'm curious what the percentages work out to with the letters. As an example, is the letter S in 10%, 20%, 30% of all the banding codes. I wonder if the percentage is high enough to actually provide an advantage when using SORA as an opener, or any consistent opener for that matter. Using ridiculous extremes as an example, if S is in 1% of all banding codes, then S is not in 99% of the banding codes. If you use S in 100% of your opening guesses, you'd be wrong 99% of the time. Maybe my logic is flawed, but I see no strategic advantage to using the same code over and over again as an opener based on how common the letters are. I can understand using the same opening guess for different strategic reasons, but I see no advantage to using SORA as an opening guess all the time. I look at it like cutting a deck of cards repeatedly and betting that you're going to turn up the ace of spades every time. Just sharing my confused spin on games of luck.

BRDL 31 ???? ???? ???? ???? ????

BRDL 30 ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? ???? I waited until my last guess before checking the list. Kind of sad I couldn't think of any more possibilities on my own, especially after seeing the answer. Oh well, I still enjoy the game, even when it makes me feel stupid. ?

The news story I posted in the Birding News forum speculates that the birds were trying to avoid a predator from above. Theory is that the upper birds in the flock tried to evade a predator and ultimately drove the lower birds into the ground.

When I see those kind of numbers I can't help but think that there's some pretty wealthy birders out there. Let's face it, if you want to keep adding birds to a life list, you have to travel more and more to get new birds. To get that many birds, you need to travel to an awful lot of different places, and probably need to hit some of those locations more than once. I suppose there could be some of those birders traveling on their company's expense and getting in some birding on their business trips, or some birders getting funding for research purposes, but I suspect that you have to have some pretty deep pockets to be able to afford that many birds on your life list.

It probably was a foot or less of snow over two or three days. You would think it was a lot less than that by looking at fields behind the house this morning. It was the next few days of high winds that blew the snow out of the fields and dropped it all at my back door.

BRDL 29 ???? ???? ???? No list today, just luck.

Nope, I haven't been part of the workforce for about 5 years now. I just wanted to get the snow cleared before it had a chance to partially melt and turn into a block of ice with the temps going above and below the freezing mark. Luckily, most of the snow drifted behind the vehicles and not so much in front of the vehicles. Also lucky that the drifts behind the house don't need to be cleared.

Snow can be a lot of fun to play in, @Clip, unfortunately today wasn't a play day. A view from behind the vehicles. Cell phone photos before and during the snowblowing.