Those of you who live in the East may think this silly, but the Cardinal, one of the birds I grew up with in Tennesse, is one of my favorites. We don't have them here and it's always a thrill to see them when I travel back into their range. I took these pictures of a male I saw while walking through the site at Parkin.
5 comments:
Beautiful! I also grew up in Tennessee and am thrilled to have cardinals to admire here in Tucson.
I don't think it is silly at all, despite the fact that I see cardinals every day! It's our State Bird here in N. C., too. Working at a large outdoor zoo, we have lots of foreign visitors not familiar with native birds and wildlife get ecstatic when they see a male cardinal! And take photos of them right and left! A good reminder to NOT take such beauty for granted. Usually when feeding our waterfowl here at the zoo, numerous cardinals come in for the leftovers, and I have been sitting on a stump many times observing the ducks feed with fully a dozen pairs perched all around me, brightening the otherwise somber gray forest. And let me get a geekoid factoid in here--it is often speculated WHY the male is so much brighter colored and more vulnerable therefore(?) to predation than females--there are various theories and actual studies on this. One many aren't familiar with is that perhaps, AT NIGHT, the male is actually quite well camoflouged, and apparently males take their turns on the nest AT NIGHT. In the dark, Red is actually good camoflouge to any with color vision(try it some night with dark red clothing--it's true! Until someone beams a flashlight on you!), and predators without color vision, it's kinda a moot point.....L.B.
Beautiful! I also grew up in Tennessee and am thrilled to have cardinals to admire here in Tucson
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For years I have been wanting to come down your way and see Pyrrhuloxia. Of course, you can go up to Phoenix and watch Cardinals play football
We have so many here in Massachusetts is fun! My boys grew up calling them Red Jays... They hatch their chicks in our yard every year, it's great for pix!
Karen Bodio Graham
You realize that even when I was the boys' age there were none. They were part of a postwar invasion of the north by them, mockingbird, the tufted titmouse, turkey vulture, and (last) the glossy ibis-- Mike Conca and I actually found some of the first nests when I was living in Marshfield. The cattle egret, over from Africa to South America ad then to the north, reached Vermont just about at the end of my high school years.
And let us not forget possums.
In NM we have watched white- winged dove and great- tailed grackle come up the river and then the hill, Neotropical cormorants become common on the Rio,and the unstoppable Eurasian collared dove (luckily good to eat) invade from the other direction; that is, from the east. Javelinas moved to as far north as we are; coatimundis are in the Gila now but south of us.
This is a blog post isn't it?
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