Anchorage Birding On Smoky Day

My birder friend Dianne agreed to take my daughter, nieta, and me birding today.  We hit some Anchorage spots, then went onto the military base.  Here are a few highlights - though I increasingly frustrated with my inability to take consistently clear pictures with my camera of distant birds.

A common loon with her big chick

 This is an osprey that flew to the top of the tree with a good sized fish.  It's dangling pointed toward 5 o'clock from the birds talons.

 And salmon were spawning.

By mid day I realized how smoky it was.  The paper this morning had said that we had a big fire (spread by yesterday's strong winds) to the South and another to the north.  By midday it became really obvious.

Best I can tell, this is an F-22.  One of four or five that flew over.

This is a white winged cross beak. The colors are hard to see silhouetted against the smoky sky.

  

And this is the smoke shrouded sun later in the day.


















Nothing heavy today except the smoke.

More Wind, More Gramping Bike Time

Not much to say today.  Mi nieta* is amazing.  After she showed how comfortable she is on the bike trail yesterday, we tried something a little trickier.  No problem.

Here we encountered a tree branch that fell victim to the wind.

Then into the sanctuary.

This tree trunk has been on the ground a while.

If you click on this photo above, you might be able to see a blur of blue through the grass where the trail turns to the right.  I don't think this violates the no pictures of the nietos rule.

And here she's zoomed along the boardwalk before I could catch her in the distance.  It's so neat to see her go from determined but really careful last summer, to comfortable,  this summer, even on challenging trails.


She loves riding the bike and we have much better biking and closer trails in Anchorage than she has at home.


Tomorrow morning we go birding.

* couldn't link to the google translate page that showed mi nieta means my granddaughter.

Perfect Cloudless Day For An Eclipse, But It’s Tomorrow

The family arrived here late tonight [one of the grandkids helped me get the keyboard connected to the iPad just now] and slept in late.  I looked at birds in the morning.  Flocks of parrots, pigeons, and various other smaller birds I haven’t identified yet.  I downloaded Aves Argentina on my phone - it’s a free app that is fantastic and you don’t have to be connected to the internet to use it.  I realize most people reading this probably aren’t in Argentina, but I’m sure there are other such apps for other places - after the guide at Iguazú was using it.

   

 

 

Parrots in the first three pictures above, and this is the Great Kiskadee that we saw in Buenos Aires and again at Iguazú.  I’m not sure what this is.  If I find it in Aves Argentina I’ll add it later.

Then we all went to lunch again at the restaurant we ate at yesterday.  Everyone loved what they had. Then we walked around and found out part of why it was so good.  They have an organic garden and a farm.  So we walked around.

 

Yesterday I was marveling at how fresh the various kinds of lettuce in the salad was.  Here’s why.  They pick it just before they serve it.

 Carrots.

 

We met a couple from North Carolina who saw the eclipse in Nebraska a few years back.  And there are three Belgians where we’re staying who are also here for the eclipse.  People are looking at maps of where the total eclipse will be the longest.  From here it should be a little over a minute but there planning to go where it’s 2 minutes long.

We chatted with the owner of this place and we’re having a BBQ here and then we think we’re all going to see the eclipse where it’s two minutes.  But we’ll know tomorrow.  There are questions about how clogged the roads will be at the longest spots.  Some are arguing that there aren’t that many people and cars in the are and plenty of desert where you could pull over and watch.  We’ll find out tomorrow.  Just hoping the sky stays cloudless.  Totality is at 5:39 pm to 5:40pm  (that’s 1:40pm Pacific DLS Time, and 12;40pm in Alaska) or a little longer depending where you are.  The sun goes down around 6:20pm. But I have my granddaughter here for a few days so the eclipse is just frosting.

And let me add - everyone is so nice and helpful and friendly.  The owner really has mastered his smart phone and he’s talking into the phone and letting it speak back to us in English and then has us talk.

Murals In Iguazù, Hummingbird Tongue, Tres Fronteras, Marta Schwartz

We flew to Mendoza yesterday.  More on this wine country city later.  Here are some more shots from  Iguazú.


The first is at a hummingbird ‘park’.  It’s really the backyard of an Iguazú family and has been operating for 40 years.  There are lots of feeders and birds besides hummingbirds show up.  We went there at the end of our birdwatching Tuesday morning.  More on this later, but I wanted to share this  picture that has the hummingbird’s tongue.

  

At first.I thought it was the sugar water coming out, but Fernando said it was the tong ue.

 
The local indigenous people are the Guarani.  I can’t find anything in English on Guarani in Iguazú so here is something in Spanish (use Google  Translate if you need to).  I’m not sure how sensitive this account is, so read with cutural alerts turned on.

This says (very loosely)  it’s a community for growing small gardens for women who want to be entrepreneurial.

  

   This sign, I’m told, is an advertising for ca rds and tarot readings and other ‘black magic’ to help find jobs, mates, and anything you need.  

My wife noted that she hadn’t seen any statues of women and then I saw this bust of Dr. Marta Teodora Schwartz, “the angel of the forest.”    Again, it’s in Spanish, but I don’t have time to get a translation for you.  Google translate is very easy to use, just cut and paste, and it’s really pretty good translations.

And here’s a church nearby named after Señora [I’ll add this in when I get more time].

And at this point you can see Brazil across the river to the right, Paraguay across the other river to the left, and a bit of Argentina from where I’m taking the picture - Tres Fronteras. 

  

And one last mural.  I have no idea what it means.  

Overwhelmed - Here Are Some Pictures From Buenos Aires

Sorry, between being busy and doing homework and my iPad’s bad relations with Blogger, this will just be a few pictures.  We went to the Rosadel - a park with a rose garden - across a huge Avenida from where we are staying.

Then through other park areas to the Japanese Garden.

Apartments along Avenida Liberdad.

People eating out at coffee shops on the first day of winter.

It took me a while to figure out that this was a gas station.  I should mention that today was the second holiday this week, so no school.

Terns, Geese, And American Widgeons As I Experiment With the Focus On My Camera At Potter Marsh

Bird pictures -especially birds that aren't very close - have been iffy for the years I've had my Canon EOS Rebel T3i.  With my old film Pentax I could just twist the focus until I got what I needed, but these digital cameras are much more complicated.  Manual focus is not intuitive.  It's worse than that.  And the auto focus simply does not know what precisely I want to focus on when a bird is surrounded by leaves in front and behind.

I gave up on my manual a while back, finding I could usually get clearer instructions via Google and YouTube.  Today I printed out some internet pages on how to manually focus my camera, including some from an online manual, to take to Potter Marsh.  I really wasn't expecting to see the Falcated Duck that was reported still here as of May 30 (and I was right), but I figured it would be a good chance to maybe get closer to learning how to manual focus.  And if you hang out an hour or more there, things happen.

These pics today are better than my last couple of attempts, but some of these birds were relatively close.  The flying pictures came out better than others have.  The one thing I suspect that helped was that I figured out how to pic the spot (in the view finder) the camera uses to focus.  You'll find much more precisely photos all over the internet, and I'm working on that.  But I don't have a 400x lens, and that perfect sharpness isn't necessarily the goal either.

The Terns

Arctic Terns are amazing birds.  The fly from one pole to the other each year.  They're sleek and their black heads and orange beaks and feet contrast sharply with the rest of their white feathers.  And they can hover in one spot - like a hummingbird - before diving to catch a fish.

Geese

American Widgeon