Birdie Bottoms
June 20th, 2006
Okay, okay, I give in. “K” has been agitating for a post devoted to samples of my pitiful attempts at photographing birds in Hawaii last month. Here is proof of my ineptitude–or perhaps proof that I am indeed as insane as you all have been suspecting.
Click on the thumbnail images to view the larger photos.
First, of all, we have the rump of the common myna bird, which is kind of the Hawaiian equivalent of the starling. The uncooperative avian subject is photographed next to one of the oddities of residential beach-town Kailua: neon plastic Slow Children. Apparently the Slow Children have a tendency to escape, though, because they’re always chained to something.
Next we have the bottom of the endangered Hawaiian moorhen. The photo background is cropped, but that’s honestly as much as I got of the bird.
A wild mother hen teaches her chicks the trick of all birdies everywhere: turn around at the sight of a human with a camera.
Okay, this one isn’t actually a bird bottom, but it is an awful picture of a red-crested cardinal. The photographer, as usual, had trouble holding still.
The one that got away . . . a white-rumped shama. Does its rump look white to you? Bird nomenclature never ceases to puzzle me.
But, finally, victory! A more obliging shama posed for me later on. And it didn’t turn around at the last minute!
There. I think it’s safe to say that I have yet to develop the skills of a nature photographer.
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1 Comment Add your own
1. Pop Otter | June 20th, 2006 at 9:44 pm
I agree that bird nomenclature is strange. Consider the purple finch (nothing purple about it to my eyes), raspberry finch maybe or redheaded finch, but not purple. Any of those options leave out the plain brown female and immature offspring. But finch-that-isn’t-a-goldfinch seems a bit long for a name.
Then there is the red-bellied woodpecker, red-naped maybe, but it takes a really good imagination to call its belly red.
And how about the red-cockaded woodpecker on which the cockade is so small that Peterson does not even consider it a useful field mark. Its useful marks are all black and white.
I have never seen a shama, but perhaps the problem is not the color white but the location of the rump. My Peterson Field Guide identifies the parts of the bird and places the rump on the top side just closer to the head than the uppertail coverts. From what I can see in Otter’s pictures, the bird in question should be called the White Uppertail Coverted Shama.
I never had the courage to take bird pictures until the arrival of digital cameras. Delete is such a wonderful feature. Just keep snapping is my motto.
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