Back From Bama
Hey! Check out this freaky lookin' bird hanging out in Texas right now. I think it's some kind of partial albino blackbird (my guess would be red-wing but the jury is still out).
I am back from Alabama. Above is the view of the meeting room I spent most of Thursday in. It was a good thing the mountain view was mostly fogged over and I wasn't too distracted by watching thermalizing raptors. Still quite pretty.
Wednesday night when I got stuck in Memphis, the airport gave all of us stranded passengers hotel vouchers and a dinner and breakfast voucher. The hotel had a special menu for us--apparently, we were "distressed passengers". We were given $15 for dinner which covered a beverage and appetizer. The cheapest actual dinner was $14.95 and most were $16.95. The breakfast voucher was the biggest joke. It was for $5 and the cheapest thing on the breakfast menu was the small pot of coffee for $4.95. Ah well, all part of the joys of travel.
I really do enjoy traveling for work. It's fun and if something is a little boring, you always know that tomorrow I could be in a different place doing something different. But really, when you're a "birding specialist" things rarely get boring.
While in Birmingham, we stopped at a Wild Bird Center. They have a very cute puppy who greets you when you arrive. Bart, who was my contact in Birmingham, outted me at the WBC as the birdchick and writer for Birding Business and the owner said, "Oh no! You do those secret shopper articles, you're gonna look at my store." Well, not now, since I'm outted. I don't do those articles too much anymore and if I did, this store would have passed with flying colors anyway.
I did find this little birder bust at the store. Is it me, or does this look like an anime version of Lillian Stokes? She's only $26.95--a bargain!
And because we haven't had too many bird photos lately and I found this on the desktop, a random merlin photo.
I'm so excited, tomorrow I'm going to help Stan Tekiela with is Sandhill Crane and wine field trip. Alcohol and cool birds--an excellent combo!
posted by birdchick at 8:33 PM
4 Comments:
Is that maybe a leucistic yellow-headed blackbird?
Very cool!
And any menu that prints the word "Distress" on it that many times has to give you intestinal trouble.
I'm with Susan - seeing "distress" right by the food descriptions would give my stomach the wrong idea. I worry about a place that actually has a distress menu; it implies that it happens an awful lot.
I was a distress passenger w/Amtrak. They gave us cash for food and cabfare to the hotel (also free) after stuffing us with donuts and caffeine. Of course this was after starving us for a day when we were trapped on a train in the middle of Nebraska (no bird watching but there was a mysterious trailer in the middle of a cornfield).
I would have guessed a yellow headed blackbird. but it looks like it's WITH red winged so who knows.
it reminds me of the book "Swimmy" by Leo Leonni with the one black fish swimming with all the other red ones and he shows them how to swim together so they look like one big fish and then he makes the eye.
One of the fun of a big flock of red-wings is that sometimes there are yellow-heads mixed in. If you notice the flock photos, there are several cowbirds mixed as well, so a yellow-head isn't out of the realm of possibility.
It's hard to get a focus on shape with the strange coloration.
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