For the Birds

Dad is a photographer. I don’t begin to really understand that. He points one of his black boxes at something, a sound happens and we move on. To me, it’s just another way that humans have of wasting time that could be spent sleeping. But, it makes Dad happy, and I go along with it. Besides, it allows me to get out and sniff the countryside and when Dad is pointing his “camera” as the black box is known, I am pretty much free to do what I want.

Dad and me with his "big bertha" pointer.

One of the objects of Dad’s camera is a little insignificant but numerous species known as birds. Birds make me nervous. They jump around constantly, flying (not walking) across my head and make a bunch of noises that usually just mean nothing to me. I sleep during the day under a thing Dad puts up called a “bird feeder”. These birds eat weeds, or more correctly the nasty hard little things that fall out of weeds or wildflowers, called seeds. How they can survive on those hard little things are beyond me.

So, we often go hunting for birds with Dad’s black box. If I don’t go with him, he will come home and empty the contents of his camera into a bigger black box he calls a computer. He spends hours looking at this white screen. He must get something from the birds that I just can’t see.

One of Dad’s favorite places to point at birds is in our Winter home at Silent Valley in the state of California. The birds spend the winter there and when Dad puts out the seed they come from all over to eat. Dad points his camera at them all day long. He has names for the different birds. There he calls them Stellar’s Jay, Scrub Jay, Black-eyed Junco, Nuthatches, White-crowned Sparrows, California Towhee, Spotted Towhee, Acorn Woodpecker, Nutall’s Woodpecker, American Flicker and much more. Dad especially gets excited when he sees the big birds called Hawk’s flying around. Hawks like Cooper’s Hawk and Western Red-tailed Hawk are common. One of my favorite things is to watch the birds feed because often a squirrel tries to get their food. It’s funny to see the Stellar’s Jay attack the squirrel as he climbs the pole to get the food. Sometimes I’ll bark or lunge at them and they scurry away. Dad says that’s my job.

I used to chase birds until I found out I couldn't fly like them. It's no fun to never catch one!

I used to chase birds. It was fun to see them fly away. But now, in my more mature years, I know its just a waste of energy. I can’t catch one, so what’s the use of trying. Sometimes I’ll see a large animal and I chase it because I think it’s a squirrel, but when I get close its just a big black bird that Dad calls Ravens. There are a lot of them in our summer home in Idaho.

In our Idaho home there are a lot of birds too. Dad feeds them, but he says that mainly little Pine Siskins that visit the feeder. They are small birds with little patches of red on their backs and they are very energetic. There seem to always be black birds flitting around me. They are pests because there are always so many and Dad says that black doesn’t photograph very well and they chase away the more timid and prettier birds. However, there is one group of black birds that Dad really likes called the Yellow-headed Blackbirds. We don’t see them a lot, but they do visit our RV. Running across the ground and pulling up long worms are the Robins. One made it’s nest in the tree right outside our RV window so we could see the little babies as they grew this Spring. Dad says they are very attractive birds. They don’t eat seeds, so we don’t have them at our feeder, but when it rains they are all over eating the worms that pop out of the wet ground. I know that us dogs have the reputation of eating most anything, but worms!!!! Yuck!!!

Robins like to eat worms! Yuck! Even I won't eat a worm.

The American Goldfinch is a bright colored bird that visits us in Idaho.

We sometimes see a Cassin’s finch with a very red head (this is according to Dad, since I can’t see red.) Sometimes a bigger bird called the Evening Grosbeak comes around. Dad gets excited about them because they are so colorful. A couple times this summer a bird called the Western Tanager came to visit too. Dad says he is all yellow and red and very pretty. This summer an American Goldfinch perched on our tree and Dad was so excited and pointed his camera for a long time at that bird. Mostly Dad likes to find the Hawks and Eagles that fly overhead. Sometimes they come close and land on a tree. Dad runs and gets his really big camera with a long snout on it and points it. Last year Dad saw a Great Grey Owl and he pointed his camera with the long snout for an hour at it. He was very pleased with the result.

Dad got so excited when he saw this big owl.

Once Dad and I spent an hour at a friends RV here looking at small little darting birds called hummers. Dad says they beat their wings so fast to make a sound that humans call humming. Once a hummer almost slammed into my head as I was laying down on the grass. They sure fly fast. Got to wonder what their hurry is?

Dad calls these hummers because of the noise. They are just like big bees to me!

Only a few thousand paws walk from the RedRock RV park is a big lake called Henry’s Lake. Near one of the creeks that feed it, there is a place Dad and I go to watch for water birds. When he sees one as we approach the shore he uses hand signals to have me wait (so I won’t scare them away. I’m probably pretty scary looking to a small bird.) So I wait while Dad slowly moves his camera closer to the birds. He says he points at Great Blue Herons, White Pelicans, Kingfishers, Osprey, sandpipers, loons, ducks of all kinds, Eagles, Black-headed Blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds and a lot more.

The Blue Birds in Idaho like to fly from fence post to fence post in front of us as we walk down Red Rock road.

The tree swallow is all around us here, esp. in the springtime.

When we take our morning walks down Red Rock road, little Blue birds and Tree swallows perch on the barbed wire fences all in a row and as we start to pass them, they all fly at once several paws ahead of us and keep doing this all the way down the road. It’s fun to watch them all fly together.

Flickers are pretty birds, or so says Dad.

Not far from our summer home in Idaho is a place that Dad goes a lot and takes me. It’s called the Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. It’s a place that birds can go and not get killed, at least in the spring and summer. Dad says that people try to kill them in the fall and winter. Why do humans have to kill other animals for fun? Anyway Dad likes to photograph pelicans, strange ducks, swans, hawks and eagles there. We will sit for hours waiting for the right bird to come along. Sometimes I just lie down and sleep since it sooooo boring for me.

Dad loves these big trumpter swans from Red Rock Lakes Wildlife Refuge.

This Green Jay was in southern Texas, a place Dad calls Bird Heaven.

Once we went to a place that Dad called Bird Heaven. It was in southern Texas and had a lot of places that birds seem to all come together called Bird Preserves. Dad couldn’t take me but when he came back he was all excited because he saw birds he’d never seen before. In one place he said he saw a lot of rare birds, like a Indigo Bunting, a Painted Bunting, a Green Jay, a Clay-colored Jay, and a lot more. Once, he saw thousands of hawks in the sky, all moving from south to north.

Dad says this Painted Bunting is pretty, but it looks just like any other bothersome bird to me.

Birds are funny little creatures and they are everywhere I go. I can’t say that it wouldn’t be fun to be a big Hawk or Eagle someday. I doubt that it will happen, but I can imagine soaring in the sky and looking far in the distance, diving at little squirrels and then flying home to Dad to be fed when I’m hungry or lonely. Just sounds inviting, doesn’t it.

Dad says that lots of RVers are bird-watchers because it’s a fun hobby. I think a hobby is something that humans do instead of sleeping all day. Because they travel all over the country they have a lot of opportunities to see a lot of birds. Me, I’m a bird watcher, but it’s no big deal. I put my chin on the ground and let my eyes follow the birds around. It’s not worth the effort to move my head since there are so many of them and soon or later another one will come into view. I mean, what real good is there to watching birds if you can’t eat them?

Oh, if you want to see the results of what Dad does when he points his camera at birds, you can look at his best photos of birds on the Internet. Visit Dad's best bird photos at http://photos.rvinteractive.com/birds

Arf,

Reggie

Publish Post