Tag: birds

Finding – let alone retaining – focus on the feathered target is just one of many challenges faced by those who attempt to take “good” photos of birds.

Even “bird snappers” who are much more skilled than I am generally delete/should delete most of their attempts.

This is most especially true in Colombia; the world’s wettest country has a phenomenal array of birds, but most of them are very wary/reclusive, and constantly on the move.

Their movements are usually rapid, and highly “unpredictable”.

They spend much of their time in very dense, dimly-lit forest, where birds are often barely-visible.

Sometimes, however, a photographic “failure” is worth keeping, even sharing.

Toucans’ range extends from southern Mexico to northern Argentina.

Many toucans are very colourful; all of them have very large bills.

Most of the more than forty species live at low altitude, in warm, wet forests.

However, the four species that comprise the genus Andigena – the mountain toucans – are high-flyers.

They inhabit cool, humid, montane forests.

You are looking at a grey-breasted mountain toucan, Andigena hypoglauca.

The common name is inaccurate; the relevant breast is always blue-grey.

This petite owl is mostly-terrestrial; it can fly, but rarely does so.

It is diurnal, not nocturnal.

Its “home sweet home” is not  high up in a tree, cave, cliff-face or barn.

Burrowing owls dwell underground.

Their common name, however, is misleading; so-called “burrowing” owls prefer to take advantage of actually-burrowing animals.

They move into those other animals’ “abandoned” burrows.

I suspect that some owner-excavators’ “abandonment” of their homes would have been lethally “assisted” by members of the pictured species, Athene cunicularia.