I just noticed Walden’s great new icon, and it reminded me of these photos. They were taken here a few weeks ago, when the scissortail flycatchers were in the midst of their mating frenzy. It was great to see them engaging in hign-altitude aerial battles.
However, one of them seems to have gone into combat with its own reflection in our breakfast nook window. It went on long enough that I had time to run grab my camera. I got about six shots before my last rechargeable battery died (and I still haven’t found the blingblanged charger). Being backlit by a bright sky, the shutter speed was quite slow, so they are a bit blurred. (They’ve undergone a little pepping up in Photoshop.) Finally, my son threw a towel at it and scared it away. It came back a couple of times over the next few days, but eventually lost interest.
In addition to full-body assaults against the window, it also spent some time just sitting on the window ledge and pecking at its image.
I was sitting in Salina, the other day, with my mother, across from an empty field, and watching a scissortail perform its acrobatic show of aerial somersalts. They can be very graceful birds… when they’re eating.
You should see them in person. There was one hanging around the filling station last night when I went to gas up my car. I assume that it was catching the insects that were attracted by the lights. This was just after 9:00 pm, and I got to wondering if this was relatively new behavior for these birds, or if they hunted insects after dark even away from street lights and such.
A “breakfast nook” just is a little area set aside for a breakfast table–usually close to the kitchen. Ours has a big window that faces the front of the house. The lower part is rectangular and has Venetian blinds. The upper part is semicircular and always uncovered.
There’s a huge oak tree across the street, and I think that the scissortails were hanging out there. This was the first time I’d ever seen one up close. When we saw them flying way up above us, we thought they were some kind of swallow, but there are also some actual swallows here, and their tails–though forked–are quite a bit shorter.
By the way, the doves I mentioned in another thread are definitely nesting again. They were in and out for a few days, but there seems to be one on the nest at all times, now. It’ll be ineresting to see if we can spot the babies at any point.
In Ancient Times, before I was married, I had a girlfriend who kept a betta (Siamese fighting fish) in a small tank. We discovered that if we held a mirror up to the tank, it would go into its threat display, waving its fins like crazy and puffing itself up–which caused it to change from blue to a more iridescent blue with purple overtones. It would swim up close to the mirror and just sit there for a minute or so. Then it would lose interest. We found that if we took the mirror away and waited a while, we could get it go through the same thing again. Now I’m sorry that it never occurred to me to try to discover the fish’s minimum “reset” time.
Darwin’s post reminds me… my kids and I were sitting in the car while DH went in to do some banking stuff… in the rear view mirror, I kept seeing this red flash by another car in the parking lot… upon closer examination, it was a Cardinal doing battle with his reflection in the little sports car’s passenger side mirror. It was hysterically funny to watch. He was just certain that that bird was out to get him and he had to stop him… he was tireless…
There was one hanging around the filling station last night when I went to gas up my car. I assume that it was catching the insects that were attracted by the lights. This was just after 9:00 pm, and I got to wondering if this was relatively new behavior for these birds, or if they hunted insects after dark even away from street lights and such.
I have watched Blue Herons fishing at night off of docks or the shallow water around them, that had lights on them shining on to the water at two in morning. With bats circling the same light.
