Field Notes Update

Bullock’s Oriole Building a Nest at Barr Lake State Park, Colorado /  by Todd Henson

Here a Bullock’s oriole is just leaving its nest

Oriole’s are beautiful and somewhat iconic birds. In the Northern Virginia area I’ve often seen orchard orioles while out hiking through the right environment, and occasionally in some areas I’ll see a Baltimore oriole. But that’s it. The other oriole species of North America are all further west or southwest.

The first thing I noticed was an empty nest

So when I had the chance to visit Colorado in early June (many years back) I was very pleased to run into a Bullock’s oriole working on its nest right along a main trail in Barr Lake State Park. I saw the nest first. All the photos of the oriole are cropped in quite a bit to let you see the bird a bit closer. But the photograph of the empty nest is just as it was framed at 230mm with a 70-200mm lens and a 1.4x teleconverter. So the nest was very close to the trail. But when I noticed the bird trying to come back to the nest I moved further back to give it space. And that’s all it took.

An early view of the Bullock’s oriole perched in a tree near its nest

For whatever reason I struggled to identify this bird at the time. I wasn’t sure it completely fit any of the photos/descriptions in my field guides. It seemed a bit more yellow than orange which seemed to point towards a female or younger male (except for Audubon’s or Scott’s orioles, but it didn’t appear to be either of those). The blacks weren’t the stark blacks that photos of the males seemed to possess. The black goatee/chin seemed to indicate a possible male, though I read somewhere you might sometimes find a female with one and they’re thought to be older females. The narrowness of the goatee and the dark eye line pointed me towards the Bullock’s oriole, and a photo in National Geographic’s Complete Birds of North America shows a 1st spring male Bullock’s that appears to match my specimen, one that is just starting to develop the stronger black markings. And it could be complicated by the fact that Bullock’s and Baltimore orioles do sometimes interbreed (hybridize) in areas where their ranges overlap. Colorado seems more the Bullock’s range but the Baltimore’s range isn’t too very far east, so maybe? Probably not as that overlapping range is apparently a narrow one.

Another view of the Bullock’s oriole perched in a tree

The more I thought through all the field markers the more I kept leaning towards a Bullock’s oriole given the area where I found it, but I wasn’t willing to accept my own identification until years later when I ran two different bird identification apps against each of the photos and both apps identified them as a Bullock’s oriole (Icterus bullockii). And so I believe this bird to be a young, perhaps 1st spring, male Bullock’s oriole. But if you feel I’ve misidentified this bird then please leave a comment letting me know what you think it is and why, what identifiers or field marks you used to identify it.

The Bullock’s oriole has just landed at its nest and gives us a nice view of its black goatee

Interestingly, at one point in time the Bullock’s and Baltimore orioles were thought to be a single species and at the time were called northern orioles. But as happens, they were later differentiated based on DNA studies and other criteria. The name Bullock refers to William Bullock, an English amateur naturalist.

The Bullock’s oriole sticks its head in its nest

I was so fortunate, not only to find an oriole species we don’t have back east, but to find one working on its nest. I love finding birds in and around their nest. You can see such incredibly interesting behaviors, as visible in some of these photos.

I love this view of the Bullock’s oriole completely inside the nest with just head and tail showing

I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at a Bullock’s oriole working on its nest, as well as some of my struggles with identifying it. Have you ever seen this species of oriole, or any species of oriole? Let me know in the comments below.

Resources

Below are the three field guides I used most when identifying the Bullock’s oriole. Of them I found the National Geographic Complete Birds of North America the most helpful. It’s by far the largest book, not a guide you’d take out into the field, and that gave it the extra space to show some extra photos which made a big difference for me.

I am including affiliate links for the field guides and as an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This is at no extra cost to you and helps support me and this site. Thanks for your support.

The two apps I used and found very helpful were:

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Juvenile Yellow-crowned Night-Heron /  by Todd Henson

A juvenile yellow-crowned night heron

Some species of heron seem very common in the greater DC area, such as great blue and green herons. But night-herons rank among the species I rarely see. They tend to be a bit more secretive, perhaps more often out hunting at dusk and night, though as these photos show, they can also be seen by day.

Juvenile Yellow-crowned Night-heron

What we have here is a juvenile yellow-crowned night-heron. There are two species of night-heron in the area, black-browned and yellow-crowned, and if these were adults you’d more easily see why each is named as they are, though the yellow crown on an adult may be difficult to see. Adults are very distinctive and easy to identify. But the juveniles can look very similar. This one is more grey and has various markings on the feathers that help identify it as yellow-crowned.

In late July of 2008 we found several of these juvenile yellow-crowned night-herons walking the pathways around the pools at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, in Washington DC, where they grow lotus and water lilies and where large crowds gather to see the blooms each summer. Night-herons may be more secretive, in general, but given these were juveniles and that they seem to have hatched in an area where many people gather, they were very bold and unafraid, seemingly ignoring the people and focusing on the water and any prey they could find.

Juvenile yellow-crowned night heron moving towards the water

Technical Note

A quick technical note to admit to my mistakes and to demonstrate that even when we make mistakes it’s often possible to salvage something of value from them (beyond the obvious learning opportunity). On a previous photo session I’d been photographing in a very dark area and had my camera’s ISO set very high (1000 was high at the time). I’d forgotten to set it back to normal when finished, and I’d forgotten to double check my settings before setting out this morning. So for much of the morning I kept wondering why I was able to achieve such high shutter speeds (1/8000 second). Well, it’s because my ISO was set way too high for a bright sunny day.

Lessons Learned

So, what lessons did I learn from this experience and from the mistakes I made?

  • Reset my camera settings to my typical values after each photo session. That way I have a known place to start from next time I pick up the camera.

  • Always double check my settings before my next photo session, just in case I’ve forgotten to reset them. This is when I can also change the settings to suit whatever environment I’m going into if I know to expect a certain level of light.

  • If something seems off in the field, such as unusually high shutter speeds, then stop and double check all my settings. I could have found my error and corrected it much sooner.

  • It’s often possible to salvage worthwhile material even after making what seems a stupid mistake. Granted, these photos will never be as technically good as they could have been. I have lost some data to noise. But thankfully it was a bright sunny day with few dark areas so the noise was surprisingly minimal and I was able to pass the photos through Lightroom’s noise reduction process to lessen the digital noise introduced by the high ISO. The photos work perfectly well for a blog post showing off a species.

Portrait view of a juvenile yellow-crowned night heron

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Juvenile Red-tailed Hawk Cooling Off /  by Todd Henson

A juvenile red-tailed hawk cooling down in a puddle of water

Back on April 16 of 2017 while hiking the trails of Occoquan Bay National Wildlife Refuge I was waved over by another photographer. He had found a juvenile red-tailed hawk that had landed in a puddle of water in the brush not far from the trail. Being in the brush it was a bit obscured so the photos may not graduate into the artistic realm, but they do provide some good views of this beautiful young hawk.

When the hawk stood tall it showed off its white chest feathers

A profile view of the juvenile red-tailed hawk

It's interesting the flexibility hawks have to twist their head and look straight up

Being a juvenile its tail feathers haven’t yet developed that striking rufous coloration the species is known for, though you can see hints of the color. This hawk was a very light colored one as you can see when it faces its chest towards the camera and in the one flight photo I captured (though the bird was blurry in the photo).

Every so often the juvenile red-tailed hawk would look straight at the camera.

Zooming and cropping in shows details of the hawk's head and shoulders

I spent about 40 minutes photographing this young hawk, going a bit overboard by capturing 250 images, many almost the same. When I first arrived it was standing in the puddle where it spent most of that time. It appeared to be cooling off. At one point it lowered itself and ruffled its feathers just as ducks do from time to time. It walked out of the puddle for a short bit before going back into it. Only about 37 minutes later did it take flight into some nearly branches before a few minutes later taking off for some other location.

The juvenile hawk had just lowered itself into the water and ruffled its wings, splashing the water all over itself

See how the young hawk blends into the brush?

Eventually the young hawk flew into a branch partially obscured by the brush

I love spending this much time with a single animal that isn’t at all concerned by my presence. I stayed put on the trail. It stayed put in the puddle just off the trail. And even though I did create too many images, it enabled me to get various views of the hawk and to share some of those with you. I hope you enjoy looking through these photos of a beautiful young red-tailed hawk.

When the young hawk bends over we can begin to see the early signs of the rufous coloration in its tail feathers

One final view of the perched juvenile red-tailed hawk before it flies away

Though the hawk is blurry, this photo does a decent job of showing the light coloration on the underside of the juvenile red-tailed hawk's wings

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