Notes To My Mother

In spring eagles gather at the Hood Canal in Washington.  What brings them there is a little fished called the Midshipman.  The female Midshipmen lay their eggs in the oyster beds and then leave for the male fish to tend to the eggs.  The problem for the fish is the oyster beds are in shallow water so that when the tide goes out the fish are exposed.  All sorts of birds come to feast on the fish, and among them are lots and lots of eagles. The behavior shown in the two images above is called grappling.  It is a cartwheeling spinning display with talons locked.  I had heard that this was courting behavior, however, according to the Smithsonian's National Zoo and Conservation Wildlife Institute, this is aggressive territorial behavior.  In every grappling image I have the eagle on the bottom looks distressed, while the one on top appears very much in control. Here is an image of an eagle with a freshly caught Midshipmen, being tailed by one of the ever present  crows.  The eagles agg

Glacier National Park is a great place to visit and a superb place to photograph.  If you have not been there it is good to know there are basically two sides of the park, Westside and Eastside. On the west side you will find Avalanche Gorge, pictured above, and Lake Mc Donald.  Connecting the west and east sides is the Going to the Sun Highway.  It is only open once the snow is cleared and this year, 2023, there is no telling when that will be.  In a normal winter it is usually opened by the last week in June.   At the top of the pass there is a visitor center and a large parking lot.  There are also trails that leave this area going in a variety of directions.  The highline trail is a great one and I got this image early in the morning looking back toward the south as the sun was rising.  Bear Grass is shown in the foreground, a lucky find as it does not stay around long. If the Going to the Sun road is closed you can still get the east side by driving around the park to the south. 

Last year my grandson, Levi Davis-Lundblad, and I went to Mt. Shasta to see if we could get some images of the Milky Way over the mountain. We stayed just north of Weed and went exploring. We were looking for good views of the mountain and instead found a wonderful sculpture garden dedicated to veterans of war. It is located about 11 miles north of Weed on highway 97. We switched gears and dedicated our limited time to shooting the sculptures at night with the stars as our backdrop. The sculpture above is titled "Why?" and represents the upper portion of the work. "Nurses Never Sleep" is dedicated to all of the nurses who have served during wartime. "The Flute Player"During times of war a flutist were used to communicate with the troops as the sound would carry much better than the human voice. To all veterans Photo by Levi Davis-Lundblad. I am planning to return to this area during the dark skies in June to see if I can capture that image of the Milky Way

  Perhaps you have seen birds fluttering in one place in the air.   I have seen Northern Harriers do this as well as kestrels.  But most commonly it is the white-tailed Kite.  Three years ago there was a family of them in the Laguna De Santa Rosa and I had the privilege of witnessing their behaviors and capturing some of it with my camera.  This first picture (above) shows a juvenile in flight and an adult on the branch.  The juveniles are distinguishable by the brown markings.  This Kite family had three juveniles and one adult, perhaps two adults but I only saw one at any given time. Late one evening I saw this scene with the adult holding a gopher or vole while the three juveniles gathered. I was particularly taken by the orientation of the juvenile's body on the bottom left.  As it turned out I got several shots of juveniles in unusual positions.  On one occasion I photographed one of the juveniles doing a somersault in mid air (topic of an earlier post). Now this picture above