Exploring Kootenay Lake

This is the first of two postings on the Mountain Bluebird. It concerns the birds in flight. The second concerns what they are eating.

If you enter the name, Mountain Bluebird in an image search, such as Google.com, and look at the images that result, almost all of them are of the bird perched. There are nearly none of them flying although these birds spend about half their time flying as they hunt for food and they spread their wings while flying. 

So, my daughter, Cynthia, and I tried to get them flying and soon found ourselves waist deep in images. These are a few of them.

First is a picture of them perched to show the difference between the male (left) and female (right).  The male is blue with a little bit of white on the belly, while the female is better camouflaged, but does show some blue during flight.

The female in flight does reveal some blue.

Also the female in flight. Photo by Cynthia Fraser.

But the male shows much more blue. Photo by Cynthia Fraser.

In fact it is difficult to find the shot with the white.

There is a hint of white here.

Ah, there is some white.

There are more flight shots in the next posting about food.

The Killdeer is a shorebird with the longest (temporary) stay in these latitudes. It is common here from (perhaps) March to September. I saw my first ones on the second of April. Indeed, there were five of them, but never close enough to appear together in a picture. 

The Killdeer is a shorebird with a red eye ring.

It has two black bands on its head and two on its breast.

And has long wings.

Bald Eagles can be bullies.

Group effort: Of the seven pictures that accompany this posting, three were taken by Cynthia Fraser using a wider angle lens so as to capture the two eagles together (no. 3, 4, & 6).

Except when dealing with their mate or chicks, Bald Eagles will steal food from other creatures and other eagles. They will harass and attack other eagles which have made a kill in an attempt to acquire it. Apparently the adult success rate from theft is higher than that from hunting.

A juvenile Bald Eagle was sitting on a ponderosa pine enjoying what was left of a raven. I did not see it make the kill, or even know if it had made the kill. All I know is that it was finishing off a carcass.

After a while it left. Maybe it was spooked by my watching it from a distance — maybe not. It flew to another tree nearby, but, unfortunately, that tree already had a hungry adult eagle atop it.

Quickly, that eagle descended on the juvenile in an attempt to take from it whatever food it had.

The juvenile reacted quickly. In perhaps a tenth of second, it pushed itself and its food backwards causing the adult aiming for it to miss it completely.

In a picture taken perhaps a hundredth of a second after the previous one, the juvenile has pushed itself back off the tree branch and the adult sweeps by grabbing at the empty air where the food had been.

The juvenile then righted itself using its wings while the adult continued on its way empty-clawed.

The juvenile then feasted on the remaining portion of the raven unmolested. 

When I was a child here, there were no turkeys to be found locally. Wild Turkeys were introduced in the states to the south of us to appease hunters. Some subsequently wandered across the border and have become a staple, so much so that there are few jaunts about the valley where they go unobserved. As a present fixture, they are hardly worth picturing. Hardly, except when….

For a short time in the spring, the males are dressed in their grandest finery. It is then that they mate.

A female Wild Turkey is presented with a problem: which one to pick?

I watched two Red-tailed Hawks soaring together for about 10 minutes.

Undoubtedly a mating pair, the soaring Red-tailed Hawks were in the same thermal but were rarely close enough to be captured in the same picture. Yet, now and then….

This picture, below, is a composite. It shows the two apparently mated Red-tailed Hawks. Such hawks have an extremely variable plumage, and some of this variation can be seen in the couple shown here. The named feature, the red tail, is most evident on the dorsal surface where it appears brick red, but it is somewhat visible as a pink on the ventral surface, as seen here. However the red tail is not visible on immature birds. 

The feature that uniquely identifies the Red-tailed Hawk is the dark patagial mark on the underwing. This is the dark line on the leading edge of the first half of the forewing (between the body and the wrist position). Now, it is not possible in these views to distinguish the sex of the bird, but as the female is usually larger, I guess that she is the left bird.

The variation in plumage is easily seen on the wing’s ventral coverts and the belly band. Both birds (particularly the left) are undergoing moulting with flight feathers missing about half way along the wing and on the left side of each there is a feather that appears to be upside down.

In the past couple of days, I have watched flying birds. It is striking how those that travel in flocks follow different rules when it comes to synchronizing their wings. Small birds seem to ignore synchronization, big birds often adhere to it.

Smaller birds may fly in a flock, but any matching of wings seems to be merely by chance. Incidentally, these are Bohemian Waxwings. Notice that there is no hint of a crest on the head, which is collapsed when flying (see A crest would be a drag).

These are Trumpeter Swans. Five of them are flying together and matching their wings.

Six Trumpeter Swans first swam by and then took to the air.

It isn’t unusual to see a few Trumpeters at this time of year, in the water and usually feeding in the shallows. It is more unusual to see them run across the water and take to the air.

The adult Trumpeter is the heaviest bird in North America with a length of about 2 metres and a weight of about 12 kilograms. To fly it must run across the water to pick up speed for about 100 metres. It is rarely done.

After swimming much of the way, the lead swan chose to fly the rest. The rest followed.

The lead swan is running across the water and the other five are following.
 

Here the middle four have finally taken to the air.