Photographs by Frank

9 June 2020

Loons At The Nest

Filed under: Birds,Monadnock Region,Summer,Wildlife — Tags: , — Frank @ 10:45 PM

It has been about 24 days since we first saw eggs in the loons nest on Gregg Lake. Gestation in loons is about 28 days so we are expecting (hoping) to have loon chicks over the weekend. Fingers crossed!

This afternoon, right at lunch time, Joan answered the phone and received a report that there was a loon acting strangely on the main part of the lake. We put lunch on hold, gathered up binos, spotting scope, camera, etc. and headed down to the lake.

In talking with the fellow who had seen the loon acting oddly, we decided that what he had seen was really grooming behavior and our concern abated. None-the-less, we were glad that Jeremy cared enough to make a report.

As we were chatting we got a glimpse of the loon headed in the direction of the bridge and the nest on the far side of said bridge.

We hie-tailed it over to the road where we could see the nest. Shortly after we arrived loon #2 appeared at the nest where loon #1 was sitting (The numbers are arbitrary.) The incoming loon (#1) hung around the nest for a few minutes before #2 slid into the water. #1 quickly climbed up on the nest, examined the eggs and sat down. A short while later #1 stood up, turned the eggs and resettled on the nest in the opposite direction from how it had settled the first time.

Meanwhile, #2 spent a few minutes near the nest halfheartedly tossing nest building material towards the nest. Eventually #2 motored away, dove and headed under the bridge.

As #1 settled in for the long wait, we headed home for our lunch, roughly half an hour after we arrived.

I ran some errands after lunch and arrived back at the lake about 5 PM. I spent an hour and a quarter watching the nest but there was little action, just a single loon sitting on the nest.

Every time the sun came out, the loon would open its mouth and “pant”. Birds don’t sweat. Thus to cool their bodies they evaporate water from the membranes in their mouth… More-or-less as a dog does on at hot day, but without the drool!

The first eight photos shown here are from lunchtime today; the last two from the late afternoon.

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18 May 2020

Gregg Lake Loons, Update (May 2020)

Filed under: Birds,Monadnock Region,Wildlife — Tags: — Frank @ 3:43 PM

Last Friday (15 May 2020) morning , I spent a couple of hours watching the loon nest. I observed a single individual sitting on the nest and then spend a considerable fraction of the two hours I was there working on building up the nest. I saw no evidence of eggs.

This morning (Monday, 18 May 2020), I again headed down to observe the nesting loons. I arrived at about 10:15 and found a bird sitting on the nest. The temperature was in the low sixties and it was overcast.

Ten or so minutes later, I noticed a great blue heron approaching the nest area from the right. It was on the other side of vegetation from the nest and I had great hopes of an interesting photo of both the heron and the loon in a single frame. Well, I got the photo… sort of… see the third photo!

A few minutes later Joan arrived and set up the spotting scope. We were hoping to get definitive evidence of eggs.

About fifty minutes after I arrived, the loon stood up, rearranged things in the nest,sat back down and began working on the nest.

Joan was able to clearly see a single egg at this point with the spotting scope. At one point Joan could clearly see the loon lift the egg and add nest material underneath. A while later, she was able to get a clear view of two eggs in the nest. My camera was set up at a bit of a lower angle (and it does not have the same degree of magnification) so I was not able to get photos showing eggs.

Eventually, the loon must of run out of nest building material. It slipped off the nest and spent the rest of the time (more than an hour) we observed it gathering more nesting material. It does this by dredging up material from the bottom and tossing it over its shoulder towards the nest. The bird was never more that six or eight feet from the nest. On occasion it would climb onto the nest and add material to the nest. However, it was mostly in gathering mode.

About two hours after I first arrived the second loon finally made an appearance near the nest. We heard some low vocalizations between the birds at this point. The newly arrived bird tentatively approached the empty nest and eventually climbed up on to it. After a short period of egg turning and shifting around it settled down on the nest.

We decided that it was lunchtime and headed home about half past noon.

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14 May 2020

Gregg Lake Loons (May 2020)

Filed under: Birds,Monadnock Region,Spring,Wildlife — Tags: — Frank @ 10:23 PM

About five this afternoon Joan’s brother George called to say that he and Michelle had seen a loon on a nest on the north side of the bridge while they were out on a walk.

Of course, I grabbed Big Bertha (my 600 mm lens) , camera and tripod and headed down to the lake as soon as I could. The bird and its nest were easily seen at the waters edge on the far side of the lake.

Five or ten minutes after I arrived the bird on the nest slipped into the water leaving the nest empty. This behavior (i.e. leaving the nest empty) suggests to me that the nest does not (yet, hopefully) contain eggs.

I made a couple of photographs of the empty nest hoping to be able to decide if eggs were present or not. However, the angle of view did not allow a clear view of the interior of the nest.

Joan says that she saw two birds in the water at one point, but I, while concentrating on the camera, only saw one. The individual I saw stayed in the general vicinity of the nest for another five or ten minutes before disappearing. At one point it swam close enough that I could fill the frame with the bird. I watched for another fifteen or twenty minutes before hunger and the black flies drove me back home and did not see either loon again.

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1 October 2019

Close Encounters of the Avian Kind

Filed under: Birds,Early Fall,Monadnock Region,Wildlife — Frank @ 11:00 PM

This afternoon I took a break from editing the photos I made on our recent trip and took a walk up the un-maintained section of Brimstone Corner Road.

As I started down the hill towards the Hancock border, I flushed a red-tailed hawk from the middle of the road maybe twenty or thirty feet in front of me.

Initially, the bird flew up to a perch in a tree at the edge of the road where it paused for only ten or fifteen seconds — long enough for me to see the chipmunk in its talons — before flying out of sight in the woods.

It must have just caught the prey since, despite a careful look, I did not find any evidence of chipmunk “pieces” on the road; not even a tuft of fur/

No photos… I was not carrying my camera. Besides, it all happened too fast for framing a photograph. Sometimes it is best to just watch.

Close encounters with animals usually only seen at a distance are always special.

20 June 2019

A Walk and Backyard Birds

Filed under: Birds,Monadnock Region,Odontates,Summer,The "New" Yard & Environs,wildflowers,Wildlife — Frank @ 2:30 PM

Can you tell it is a rainy day here in Antrim? Must be, it is a three blog post day!

Yesterday was a hot (for NH) and sticky day. The temperature was in the upper seventies and it was mostly cloudy. The rain held off until early evening.

I took a walk up Brimstone Corner Road with the camera rigged for odes. There was not much activity and the only species I saw were chalk-fronted corporals. I saw roughly two dozen individuals in the roughly three miles I walked.

In one old log yard, I found three different wildflowers all within about a six foot radius. I barely had to move between photographs!

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When I got home from the walk, I decided to set up the camera rigged for birds on the deck. It was pointed towards the feeders. All the usual suspects were present. Finches both gold and purple as well as downy woodpeckers have been most abundant recently.

Rose-breasted grosbeaks are also common. On other days I have seen as many as three individuals on the feeders simultaneously. They were present yesterday, but I did not get any photos as they have the annoying habit of flying directly to the feeders with out stopping at one of the abundant perches available. And, as I am wont to say one should not make photos of birds on bird feeders unless one is trying to sell bird feeders!

Every once in a while, a we get other woodpeckers. Hairy woodpeckers being next most common and very occasionally a red-bellied. We hear pileated woodpeckers in the woods regularly but have never seen one on or even near the feeders.

Red-winged blackbirds are also infrequent visitors to our feeders. They are common in the wetland “down back” (about a quarter mile away) but are rare in our yard tucked away in the woods.

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20 May 2019

Star Island — Spring 2019 Birds

Filed under: Birds,Wildlife — Tags: — Frank @ 9:30 PM

This past weekend Joan and I made another trip to Star Island to experience the vernal migration of birds. This is my third spring trip; previous trips were in May 2014 and May 2017, We also visited in the fall of 2015.

Star Island is one of the Isles of Shoals off the coast of New Hampshire and Maine. As such, the island is a classic migrant trap that concentrates migrating birds in a small geographic area each day. That concentration, combined with the generally low vegetation (with sparse leaves in mid-May) makes for wonderful birding and bird photography.

The most charismatic of the migrating birds are the warblers in breeding plumage this time of year. However, there are other migrants present in addition to the warblers. There are also species that live and breed on the island. All are represented in the photos shown here.

The set of thirty photos* below begins with an image of a magnolia warbler in the chain-link fence with surrounds the island’s tennis court. I begin with this photo to show the size of the warblers… they are tiny birds! Their size, coupled with their near constant movement and their preference for thickets of vegetation make for challenging (and thus fun) photography.

I have sorted the set so that the warblers appear first followed by the other birds. I apologize for the large number of photos but there was an incredible variety of birds present on the island in the roughly forty-eight hours we were there. I tried not to show more than one photo of a species, but failed most egregiously in the case of both the yellow warbler (which breeds on the island and is thus one of the more common warblers) and the black and white warbler (which is one of the easier warblers to photograph as it tends to move a bit more slowly that most of the rest). Sometimes it is simply too difficult to choose a favorite “child”.

Lastly, there are still some photos titled “ID needed”. Hunting through bird books is not my idea of a fun time and in the interest of a timely post, they remain unidentified by me. If you care to help “fill in” those missing IDs, please leave a comment or send me an email. Corrections to the IDs I have made are also appreciated. I am hoping that Joan will do most of the “work” when she sees this post!

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* For those that are interested in such things, I made roughly 800 exposures (most but not all, of birds) while we were on the island. I processed 125 (~15%) of those exposures and present 30 of them (~4%) here.

28 April 2019

Showing Off For The Girls

Filed under: Birds,Monadnock Region,Spring,Wildlife — Frank @ 7:17 PM

Shortly after lunch today, I noticed a tom turkey and five hens meandering around our “front forty”.

The females were quite drab and practical. They spent ninety percent of the time foraging and pretty much ignored the tom.

The male on the other hand was splendid in his spring finery and strutted his stuff ninety percent of the time.

Of course, I spent ninety percent of the time with the camera focused on the male!

All of these photos were made through the glass of our storm door. These birds are way too wary to do anything else.

After about a half hour, they wandered around the garden, down the hill and out of sight.

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3 April 2019

Common Mergansers

Filed under: Birds,Early Spring,Monadnock Region,Wildlife — Frank @ 10:30 PM


Despite the inch of snow we got last night, spring is coming slowly to our neck of the woods. The new snow was gone by 10 AM. One sign that spring is nigh. Additionally, the local lakes and ponds are starting to show some open water and the birds are beginning to return. In the past week or so, we have been hearing sparse bird songs in the woods and a few waterfowl have appeared.

Late this morning Joan called me from Memorial Park (where she was doing some spring cleaning of the flower beds) . The news was that there was a pair of common mergansers on the Mill Pond. Of course, I dropped what I was doing, broke out Big Bertha for the first time in some months and headed downtown.

In addition to the mergansers there was a pair of geese present. The midday light was high and harsh. Terrible, especially, for photographing a black and white bird. I knew that “keepers” were unlikely but I spent an hour or so watching and photographing just for practice before heading home.

A few hours later, I returned to town to run some errands and stopped by the pond again to see if the birds were still around; both the geese and the mergansers were still there. Although the sun was still pretty high, the light was a bit better as there were some scattered clouds. I spent another hour or so photographing the mergansers.

Catching a merganser with prey on the surface was a rare treat. Generally, as with most diving birds, mergansers swallow their the prey while under water. One sees them with prey only when they are having difficulty in getting the prey down their gullet, as with the fairly large fish here.

Eventually, the wind kicked up and blew my hat into the pond. I got both feet wet retrieving the hat (just before it sank out of sight). and spooked the birds in doing so. I took this as sign to head home.

All of these photos are from the second session. They are more heavily cropped (one third to one half of the full frame) than I would like but mergansers are very wary birds.

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18 August 2018

Morning Visitor

Filed under: Birds,Monadnock Region,Summer,The Yard,Wildlife — Tags: — Frank @ 9:59 AM

One the the large oak trees down by the road has a large dead branch that overlooks Joan’s vegetable garden. Semi-regularly we see birds of prey, usually hawks sitting in this branch.

This morning, while eating breakfast, Joan noticed a hawk perched in “the branch”. I made a few exposures from the driveway before it decided to head off.

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20 June 2018

Hattie Brown Road

Filed under: Amphibians,Birds,Mammals,Monadnock Region,Odontates,Summer,Wildlife — Tags: , , , — Frank @ 12:11 PM

Yesterday afternoon I took a walk up Hattie Brown Road. This old (and now gated) road leads to an old homestead but is used mainly for logging access these days. On its way up to the old foundation (which is roughly a mile from Craig Road) , the road passes a beaver pond and a fairly new (i.e. still grassy, not brushy) log yard. Both are good spots for odes.

The weather was ideal; the temperature was in the low 70s F, the skies were azure blue and there was a bit of a gusty breeze blowing.

At every sunny spot on the road there were chalk-fronted corporals, often a dozen or more in one patch of sunlight. I saw literately hundreds of individuals, in total.

In addition to the corporals, I saw a half dozen Hudsonian whitefaces, mostly maturing (i.e. turning from yellow to red) males, two or three teneral frosted whitefaces (along the edge of the beaver pond), a single four-spotted skimmer (in the woods near the old foundation) and a single spreadwing (in the beaver pond).

I also saw a single darner of some sort. It perched briefly on a stem of grass along the road by the beaver pond. However, the weight of the insect, its sail-like wings and the wind conspired against me making its photo. It was swaying back and forth so vigorously that I could not keep the critter in the viewfinder, much less focus on it!

It was also a good day for seeing non-ode animals. I saw a both tiger swallowtails and pipevine swallowtails; a few of each type. I also found a small (first joint of your thumb-sized) toad at the edge of the road in the woods and a painted turtle (a female wanting to lay eggs?) in the middle of the road a few dozen yards up hill from, and pointed away from, the beaver pond.

I also saw an indigo bunting at the edge of the log yard. It hung around long enough so that I could remove the extension tube from between camera and lens. Although with only 300 mm of magnification available, the resulting photos are merely record shots.

Lastly, I observed a young deer in a small sunny patch on a skid road leading off of the main road. If was maybe fifty feet from me, but it did not hang around long enough for me to even contemplate removing the extension tube this time.

All-in-all are very good few hours of wildlife observation!

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