Hi all, Today I wanted to check the performance of a new teleconverter to my video camera. So I decided to go to Cornell dump and try some gulls.
As I was at the corner of the Dodge road and Stevenson Road, I saw a Red-tailed Hawk sitting on a fence and there were three Turkey Vultures in the pheasant pen. So I thought they were waiting to eat some dead thing in the pen. I pulled my car to the side and got my camera out and took some pictures and video. Around that time a car passed very near it. The hawk did not budge. Soon it turned towards the pen and flew through the grass setting several pheasants in flight. I still thought it was trying to grab something dead. Then it flew again to another spot and tried to grab a live pheasant, which escaped. Then I realized it was trying to get one. And the vultures were waiting in the hopes of red-tail killing one. I spent next half an hour watching and taking video of the hawk. It made 7 to 8 passes at the pheasanst and every time the pheasants escaped. Finally it decided to sit in the pen. I spent next ten minutes and there was no movement, so I deiced to move on along the dirt road hoping to look for gulls. To my surprise there were almost no gulls at the dump except for a few of them. I headed back and on the way back I found the redtail was sitting on a tree. At my approach it moved to another tree further away. Finally, the hungry hawk was unsuccessful and deiced to give it up. I always thought they took the weaker or dead ones, I did not think they hunted for a live pheasant! >From here I decided to try my camera in the arboretum where I know there are >generally lots of fruit eating birds hanging around the crab apples. When I >reached the spot I did not see a single bird. I drove around the road and at >one location I found there were lots of birds near another grove of crab >apples. Here I spent almost an hour watching and taking pictures of the 100s >of Cedar waxwings and several of American Robins. Starlings never gave me a >chance to photograph them. I have never been successful ever. One of the Robins after eating some fruits rested and slowly started singing softly as if humming. I could hear him, never saw his mouth open but by the movements of his tail and his gently rising and falling breast one could say he was singing. After some time he stopped singing and yawned a couple of times. Around four pm all of a sudden all robins and waxwings flew away together to north of the plantations. I first thought probably there was a hawk or something that scared them. I looked around and found nothing. May be it was just time to get to ready to go to bed. I was returning home, near the Cornell Orchards store on 366 I found lots of Starling sitting on wire and some of them were coming down to a crab apple tree. So I thought I might have a chance to photograph. I stopped there I was still trying to get my gear ready. Lots of starlings were on wire sitting pretty close to each other. One of the starling decided to land in between to two closely sitting starling. This made one starling move to the right a bit and that made the next starling move to the right. That ended up in a chain reaction where some twenty starlings one by one moved to the right in the form of ripple effect till there was no starling in the immediate vicinity. It was so amazing to watch as they hopped aside one by one to make space for the other. That was so cute! I thought these guys are very cooperative! I wish I could have filmed the whole episode but was little too slow to catch this effect. As I got out of my car in my driveaway, a Hairy Woodpecker was making known his presence to me by calling loudly. Cheers Meena Meena Haribal Ithaca NY 14850 42.429007,-76.47111 http://www.haribal.org/ http://meenaharibal.blogspot.com/ Ithaca area moths: https://plus.google.com/118047473426099383469/posts Dragonfly book sample pages: http://www.haribal.org/dragonflies/samplebook.pdf -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
