Birding - Not the Video Game

Tomorrow we move out of our fourth floor bird viewing nest. We've had some great birds this week. J definitely saw an owl (she thinks a barred Asian owlet) and I saw either a brown hawk owl or maybe it was a besra. Today we saw a pair of leafbirds - probably golden fronted leafbirds, but they weren't quite the same. One looked like the one on the bottom left. The other looked like the bottom right, but all green on the belly too. Picture from นกเมืองไทย







All these pictures have birds in them. Enlarging the picture will make them easier to see. This one is a big grey bird that flew off before we could even start to identify it.
This pictures has three drongos in it. Double click it to see it bigger.

With the leaves gone now from most of the trees, it's much easier to see the birds. Here's a picture of the same trees back in January.



This isn't to mention our regulars - all the drongos, the bulbuls, the sunbirds (harder to see and photograph as the picture of the olive backed sunbird shows, but if you double click it you can see it better), the doves, the coucal - one flew lazily right past us today, it's brown wings contrasting to the rest of its black body - and the koels, heard more than seen.

Here is this free show, this game - spot the birds, identify the birds - that is available to all. Yet somehow electronic games, using up energy, usually inside, usually costing money is far more accessible to most than watching birds. But the ability to sit and wait for birds, the ability to know the different kinds of birds by sight and by their calls is something that has to be built into our genes. It's how humans survived for all but the last 100 years on earth.


Verlyn Klinkkenborg writes today in the NY Times about the importance of watching birds,

There’s an insouciance about birds in their element that always feels to me like a comment on the human species. I see a vulture looking side to side as it slides by overhead, and it looks to me as though it’s artfully and intentionally ignoring the skill of its flight. I saw the same thing in the Chilean fjords a year ago. We sailed past dozens of black-browed albatross, and every one of them — serenely afloat — looked up at me from the waves with the self-confidence of an athlete, effortlessly drifting on the tide and wondering what element humans call their own.