Walter the squirrel

We have this squirrel that lives around our house. He's kind of a doofus. It's a good thing this is a predator-free environment, sometimes he makes enough racket in the trees that you'd think a couple of sasquatchi were getting it on. I call him Walter, in honor of Walter Sobchak. He's fat, noisy, but basically harmless, and if that isn't enough to earn the name, check this out:


He's also curious and if I'm out and about sometimes he'll just plunk down and watch me. Which affords me the opportunity to practice digiscoping if the birds aren't cooperating--which, lately, they ain't been.


Last Sunday afternoon, he was up on top of the telephone pole next to the driveway, chittering away at me in between breaks to groom his fur and--I am not making this up--scratch his pits. I hauled out my little scope and started snapping.


The lowest useful magnification my scope will do is 30x. To get this last shot, I had to open the gate to the back yard and go all the way to the end of the property just to get a wide enough field of view. That's a good problem to have.

Theropods of Claremont, or, learning ornithology in front of a live audience

Every day between about 5:30 and 6:30 PM I have no scheduled obligations, my driveway is out of direct sunlight and there are lots of birds about. And, as luck would have it, I have a small Maksutov-Cassegrain which functions as telescope by night and a spotting scope by day. So I started photographing birds.

I won't lie to you: this started out as basically onanism with a telescope. You know, I couldn't get what I wanted (moon, planets, etc.), but I could still get something.... But against all odds I started to get interested in who's around. I finally knocked the dust off my copy of The Sibley Field Guide to Birds of Western North America, which until the past couple of weeks had gotten about as much use as my copy of the complete works of William Shakespeare (i.e., it looked nice on the shelf, and implied erudition I don't actually possess).

This evening was particularly good; in an hour I saw and photographed five species. That's nothing by the standards of real birders, but for me it was a record. All were perched at one time or another in the top branches of a tree three houses down, or on the power lines at the end of the block. The tree is 70 yards from my driveway, and the power lines are a bit farther. I took all the photos with an Orion Apex 90 scope, Orion Sirius Plossl 25mm eyepiece yeilding 50x, and a handheld Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera. Many thanks to Alan Shabel for help with the identifications. Here they are:


A Northern Mockingbird, Mimus polyglottos. One of several in the neighborhood. I see them mainly when they come perch in the top of the target tree and scare off my intended quarry (see below).


A Band-Tailed Pigeon, Columba fasciata. I didn't know this was anything other than a feral Eurasian Rock Dove (i.e., regular pigeon) until I checked Sibley's. A strikingly beautiful animal, for a pigeon. I've seen these before, and just didn't know what I was seeing.


An Acorn Woodpecker, Melanerpes formicivorus. Today was the first time I'd actually seen one of these things around here, or ever identified a woodpecker to species. He spent quite a while tearing up our municipal infrastructure. Maybe I can score some stimulus bling for something called woodpecker monitoring.


Oh, now this little fartskin was a whole 'nuther kettle of fish. Didn't even sit still long enough for me to get the scope properly focused. Wham, bam, what the hell was that? I think, based on the reddish throat and face and black-and-white striped breast, that this is a Red-Throated Pipit, Anthus cervinus House Finch, Carpodacus mexicanus (thanks to Neil for the save, and for making my secondary title even more appropriate). But for all I know it might be a Rosy-Bummed Sky Kiwi or a Uruguayan Yaksucker, neither of which are covered by Sibley's. Perhaps I got the expurgated edition.


Those are all great birds, but the one that got me into this crazy pursuit is this little fellow, this particular individual, a male Anna's Hummingbird, Calypte anna, whom I spotted a couple of weeks ago buzzing about like a tiny helicopter or a slightly-larger-than-average bumblebee. Belying his clade's reputation, he does sit still from time to time, almost always on this exact spot on this exact branch of the same exact tree three houses down. You'd think that regularity of habit would make him easy to photograph. But he has a couple of traits that I'd never read about which make him a frustrating target. First, he's psychic; if I raise the camera to the eyepiece or, heaven forfend, call someone over for a look, he's gone. Sometimes for the rest of the day. Second, he's happy to show me his iridescent green back all day, but only rarely will he turn around and flash the iridescent red feathers that cover his face and neck.


Finally, finally today I got this shot. This is the same bird as in the shot above, about two minutes later. When the sunlight catches those feathers, the effect is unbelievable. One look at that and you might start to understand why a grown man would spend an hour every evening looking through a thermos-sized telescope at a thumb-sized bird half a block away. But when he turns around, away from the late afternoon sun, the effect is lost, and the feathers are a flat dark red, a bit like dried blood.


And like that, poof, he's gone.

Gettin' squirrelly

People come to things by circuitous routes. I have heard of more than one person who got into paleontology through art; they started out by drawing dinosaurs and graduated to studying dinosaurs (not everyone makes that transition...).

I sometimes wonder if I will eventually become a birder. This thought first came to me when I was ODing on natural history a couple years ago. I dig watching animals, pretty much without reservation. I have a big aquarium and keep fish, for most of my life I kept turtles, and every time I've bumped into an animal--okay, a vertebrate--outdoors I've observed it with great interest, regardless of exactly what kind it is. You can go fishing and you can go herping, but those require going where the fish and herps are, and even then there's no guarantee you'll see any. You can't usually just "go mammaling" because usually mammals are either absent or laying low. But you can walk out the door just about anytime and see birds. So it seems reasonable to me that someone with a broad interest in watching critters might end up as a birder because birds are there to watch.

Any committed birders out there are probably appalled at my lack of passion. In which case, hold on, you ain't seen nothin' yet.


Over the holidays I blew a hundred bucks worth of Christmas money on a spotting scope. Partly because I'd always wanted one, partly because I intended to use it as a travel telescope for those dark Oklahoma skies (a successful venture, I might add). Today I was just monkeying around with it and decided to try taking some pictures of birds in the back yard. I didn't get any birds, but I did get some good pix of the neighborhood squirrel. If I do ever become a birder, it will be at least partly because I enjoy--in the immortal words of Mike Taylor--badgering around with telescopes.

UPDATE: I'm not alone! "I took my very first bird photograph through my astronomical telescope in 1998."

Taken by afocal projection using a Celestron C70 spotting scope, Orion 32mm Plossl eyepiece, and Nikon Coolpix 4500 digital camera.