Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

A picture worth a 1000 words. Personal photo. As Forrest Gump once professed, "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're going to get." Birding is a lot like that as well. I remember going on a birding trip when I was about ten with a teen birder at Wayland Community Gardens in eastern Massachusetts expecting that his advanced years would clearly be an asset to finding a multitude of rare and unusual species. The birds it seemed, had other ideas. The only bird we saw that day was a lone black-capped chickadee investigating the twigs of a bare oak. I was extremely disappointed to say the least, not only because of the poor turnout, but I was annoyed at myself for not speaking up more. I guess, I was just a shy kid. Fast forward to about two weekends ago, I spent birding the Trinity Center property looking for birds for: 1. relaxation purposes, and 2. providing a checklist to submit to eBird the next evening in front of an audience of Road Schola...

I was visited by a mourning dove ( Zenaida macroura ) this morning. No doubt as soon as some of you read the title, you were annoyed as any proper birder would be. Upon reading it, the thought; "it's pronounced "mourning" not "morning"!", flashed through your mind with unforgivable zeal. Perhaps I'm being too presumptive. Maybe. Mourning doves are a common backyard bird found over most of the United States and are one of two species of pigeon that can be found in New York state. The other is the ubiquitous rock pigeon (or dove depending on the age of your field guide) that I see everyday stealing grain from the ducks on the zoo's main pond or soaring v-winged over the skyscrapers and ruined factory buildings of downtown Syracuse. While we've been visited by pigeons every once in a while, the bird that visited this morning was a juvenile. The plumage on this bird is scalloped and a little unkempt. It likely hatched out a month ago and ...

As I come to know this small corner of Pennsylvania over the next two months or so, I decided last weekend that enough was enough and that while my iPhone could try with all its might to take good photos, it didn't actually compare to a good digital camera. So last Saturday, I returned from a nearby Best Buy with a Canon Power Shot SX510 and started shooting. While my first and foremost love of the natural world is rooted in bird life, I tried to take some photos of other things to get a feel for the landscape as well. Ultimately though, I took mainly bird photos and that's what I'll be sharing here. I got the chance to visit Peace Valley Park in New Britain, PA for a third time this past weekend. The main reason for my visit was to try and seek out a Red-headed Woodpecker ( Melanerpes erythrocephalus ) that had been spotted near Angler's Pier on the NW side of Galena Lake. As bad luck would have it, the bird didn't appear before me, so I took photos of other, m...