Kirtland's Warbler, Grayling Michigan. 5/27/2017 (with video)

    Made a quick trip to the Jack Pine forest area near Grayling yesterday to view Kirtland's Warblers. This rare recovering songbird is an easy find in this area.  I heard 5 or 6 singing males along a half mile stretch road. A couple of them were cooperative enough to pose for some decent photos.  

  Here is the video

Osprey

  This afternoon I noticed an Osprey flying over my yard.  Luckily my camera was handy and I was able to get a couple of shots as it flew across the patch of sky not blocked out by trees.

    As I checked the photos I noticed it had a firm grip on a hearty meal.

Yellow Perch?

   Five minutes later it passed by again like a new kid trying to find a welcoming table in the lunchroom.

   But by this time most of the front half of the fish was gone.

  This is the second Osprey that I've seen from my deck in three years.  More noteworthy is that my yardfish list is no longer blank.

Shorebirds on South Pier 5/23/2017

Ruddy Turnstone

     Dave Dister alerted me to a nice mix of shorebirds that appeared on the south pier of Ludington Harbor yesterday.

No stone left unturned

Dunlin

Saving some leftovers

  

Least Sandpiper

Spotted Sandpiper

Semi-palmated Plover

Sanderlings

Great Blue Heron

Tawas Point State Park

   

  Drove across the state this morning to the shores of Lake Huron unsuccessfully chasing a Fork-tailed Flycatcher. According to more punctual birders I missed the Fork-tail by 2 hours.  In the three hours that I searched for the target bird I saw some more pedestrian neotropic migrants.

Immature Summer Tanager

Scarlet Tanager

Orchard Oriole

Female Baltimore Oriole

Northern Parula

Blackburnian Warbler

Indigo Bunting

Rose-breasted Grosbeak

  Of course a late report from Marc North this evening reveals that the Forktailed Flycatcher has been refound in Tawas State Park.  I think that I'm living on the wrong side of the state because while I was over on the sunrise side a Painted Bunting was found in the same (Iosco) county and in nearby Bay County  a Laughing Gull, a Eurasian Wigeon as well as both Marble and Hudsonian Godwits were found.

Golden-crowned Sparrow 5/9/2017 Whitefish Point

Seventh State record Golden-crowned Sparrow

     My third attempt over the past six years to see a Golden-crowned Sparrow in Michigan was successful, even though it took two days to cross paths with it.  I had spent about an hour and a half , off and on throughout the day on Monday without any luck.  But early Tuesday morning the target bird showed up after about a ten minute wait.  It ducked in and out of the brush as it warily avoided migrating Sharp-shinned Hawks that passed over.
  It had lots of sparrow company around the feeders behind the Point Gift Shop.

White-crowned

Lincoln's

Clay-colored

American Tree Sparrow

   The Siskins were fueling up for their trip across the big lake they call Gitche Gumee.

Purple Finch

Ruffed Grouse

    Other migrants passing Whitefish Point include....

Broad-winged Hawks

Common Loon

     Some birds were content to hang around a little longer

Common Loon

Red-necked Grebe

Neotropic Cormorant, Tahquamenon River 5/8/2017

   A Neotropic Cormorant, whose normal range goes from extreme southern Texas all the way down through most of South America. turned up last week in the Tahquamenon River in the eastern UP.

Neotropic Cormorant flanked by two of the Double-Crested variety

  Meanwhile at Whitefish Point

Red-necked Grebes

Sharp-shinned Hawk

Lincoln Sparrow

Loggerhead Shrike

  Just north of Manistee a Loggerhead Shrike has been hanging out on Bar Lake Rd. for a few days.  On Friday I made the forty minute drive but could not find the bird.  After not seeing any reports of it on Saturday, it was sighted again in the same area by Leonard Graf at 10:45 this morning.   So early this afternoon I finally caught up with the little impaler as it hunted from the power lines right alongside the road.  

   The Red-headed Woodpecker in my yard has not been seen since the 4th which was its fourth straight day of hitting my suet feeders.

    The local Pileated Woodpecker showed up in the yard after almost a one month absence.

    What's remarkable in the unremarkable photo below is that the dark speck near the center is Bald Eagle flying at very high altitude.

Bald Eagle spotted without optical aid and photographed with a 500mm lens and 1.4x converter

  How high you ask?  Well let's do the math.  First we have to figure what its angular size is.  The easiest way to do this is to compare it to an object of a known angular size.   After the sunset on Thursday the waning crescent Moon was high in the evening sky.  So I took a photo of it using the same set up that the eagle photo was taken.  

Moon shot with 500mm lens and 1.4x converter

Cut and pasted Eagle onto Moon while maintaining scale of respective photographs.

  The Moon at that time was 30.807 arcminutes in angular size.  By measuring the Eagles's image and comparing it to the Moon we get an angular size of 2.800 minutes of arc for the bird.  Now we take 1 over the sine of 2.8 arc minutes and find that the raptor was 1227.9 times farther away than its wingspan. The wingspan of a Bald Eagle ranges from 5.9 to 7.5 feet.  You could argue that the Eagle in the photo doesn't have its wings fully extended.  So if you conservatively subtract a foot from the birds full wingspan you get that the birds height is (4.9' to 6.5') x 1227.9 =  6016' to 7981'