Taking a break from work to walk around the block, I’m coming back up the street and see this enormous crow take off from the sidewalk a couple houses up from where I’m at, fly across the street, and land on the roof of a house. Damn, I’m thinking, that thing was HUGE. Then I take a closer look - not a crow, a freaking turkey vulture! I see them frequently out in the country but don’t think I’ve ever seen one in our residential area before.
My little brother retired a few years ago and has really gotten into photography. Last year he moved from Michigan to Colorado. He found a tree with owl pellets around the base. After a few days watching the tree he saw a great horned owl.
The tree became a project for him. He hiked to it every day at different times of day. He got some shitty pictures. Eventually he got a few good shots, like this one:
Wow! Good job, kayaker-bro!
When I retire I can see doing something like that. Spend five weeks trying to get a good picture.
There’s a FB group called “shitty bird photography” he might quite enjoy. I find it hilarious, very tongue-in-cheek.
Helluva beautiful shot posted here, though. He must have some nice zoom lenses.
He’s told me all about his lenses, but I usually doze off during the f-stop part.
Hey that photo’s so good it would almost be worth listening!
( 
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j
I’ll just round up my personal trifecta of SE England’s spring flowers. We’ve ha bluebells; we’ve had wild garlic as well, but here’s a slight return on that one, a road I try to cycle every year at this time:
Click for the full image - both sides of the road are lined with densely packed garlic for three or four hundred meters. The smell is wonderful.
And finally, early purple orchids, this photo from the Worth Way cycleway, not far from East Grinstead (again).:
There we have it. Hope you liked it.
j
I just got back from Belgium, and saw a bird I’ve never seen in person before (mainly because I don’t live in Europe), the great crested grebe.
This one was on the river Lys in the downtown area of Ghent. Not a great shot; I wasn’t really expecting to do any wildlife photography on this trip. These guys were interesting to watch - they can stay underwater for a long time and you don’t know where they are going to pop back up after a dive.
Cool! Never seen a grebe in the wild.
Saw a loon from my kayak once and every time I paddled/drifted too close it would disappear, then pop up somewhere else.
I saw this plump Robin while I was drinking my coffee.
I know they are pretty common, but we don’t have them in Phoenix, so it was nice to see this one in Durango:
Did it time travel, or transport out?
It’s a robin — it used a wormhole! 
I have never been to your neck of the woods.
This cardinal was bopping around our pear tree basically picking off cicadas at will. We’re gonna have a lot of fat birds here this spring.
Snow on the Needles.
Breathtaking.
I put up a new bird feeder and have managed to stymy the squirrels. It’s one of those compressed blocks of seed in the shape of a bell.
The squirrel tried to get to it yesterday but the string is too long for it to come from the top. It’s too far away from the window for the squirrel stand on that. I haven’t seen it try to jump onto it, but since there aren’t squirrels on it chowing down, I’m guessing that doesn’t work.
The squirrel did manage to leap onto the pole, hold on with three feet, and stretch far enough to get to the bell . It managed to get one or two bites before sliiiiiiiding down the pole.
So I covered the pole in vaseline
Besides the squirrel I had a chickadee (maybe more than one), a woodpecker and a cardinal check it out.
In keeping with my only other substantial contribution to this thread, about finding the carcass of a dead bunny in our back yard, yesterday I saw the carcass of a 42-foot humpback whale that came ashore in Swampscott, on the North Shore of Boston.
It had originally washed onshore in Marblehead, several miles north, a few days earlier, and had been towed out 50 miles to sea. The tides and current carried it back. The town of Swampscott and the EPA haven’t decided what to do about it yet.