Hey guys,
I just asked the above question out of curiosity to know more about what you see. Many of us might have not seen what you have seen and I think its a better way to know about the species form your experiences.
My best observation since June 2021 is seeing a Darter for the first time. One way how we can get to know if that bird is a Darter or not is by it’s neck. It has a long neck and a very streamlined body. A part of it diet is snakes.
What about you ?
I am not a good photographer at all, my only success is clicking the photo of an insect, which is not that good, but I am a good observer, there is the strange things happen to me like butterflies, moths get into my face always but when take camera they run away, same goes for bird, my terrace is like a rainforest when you are without camera because I don’t use pesticides and grow native grasses on my terrace( my mother hates that so I always grow vegetable growing plants to impress her, so that she don’t rip off my plants), but when you take out your camera to click photo then everyone thing just disappears’ if I found a dragonfly sitting on bush, then I take atleats 5- 10 min to go close to it, slow like a praying mantis but when I make lense focus it io dragonfly then strange force oppose me, mosquito start biting me, wind statrting to blow and then you know what happens later I cry like a baby. Still fact is I came in contact with them that a good thing
It’s really hard to choose, just this Monday I was participating in plant bioblitz so had no camera with me (it’s killing my neck and back too fast), and right at this day I met young Honeybuzzard, it was a young one that let me came as close as 5 metres to him, best opportunity to loose, it was little bit hard to decide whether it was a common buzzard, because sunlight went right in my eyes, so it looked just solid black and as it’s a young bird I couldn’t see if it has 3 lines on the tail or not, but in the end I ecided its head was streamlined enough to say it’s not Buteo, of course when I got home I saw those photos show more than I thought. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/93029759
Just to not focus on failed best observation, there’s one of a common species met in uncommon circumstances. It’s a young Wryneck, they got their name for the way they scare off predators from their nest in tree holes: adults start doing snake-like waves by their nake and start hissing (males are singing something between regular woodpecker vocal song and buzzard cries). This is a young one, so, as you can hear from audio, it made weird insect-like sounds, we saw it first when we were looking after a pair of Black Redstarts and yound Masked Wagtails & Pied Wheatears when sitting under the bridge (river was not existent in July), I saw it hopping on the edge of supposed riverbank less than 10 metres from us, place where you’re not likely to see this bird, it feeds on ants and prefer forests to live in, so it wasn’t a normal spot to see it, plus it was a young bird who really didn’t care about me and even though I still can’t make a decent pic, what I got was pretty ok and you can see how it moves from one shot to another. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/87837886
I take monthly pictures in my garden. Looking at flowers, but if there are insects I try to capture that too. Tecomaria flower with bee. I know that some bees blow nectar bubbles into the wind … and the sunlight caught the bubble, expanding and contracting. Camera agreed to cooperate. Don’t think I will ever manage that right time right place again!
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/93141547
ya that’s kinda true
I too have a Terrace garden that looks like a rain forest,but I rarely find damselflies.
but I see a lot of birds and most popular are Sunbirds
One of my more interesting observations in that time period is this Culex territans, a mosquito that feeds on amphibians! I found it feeding on a Northern Pacific Tree Frog (Pseudacris regilla). I had previously never seen a mosquito anywhere except on or near humans, or in spider webs.
Another is this more recent observation of a Bittersweet Nightshade, which not surprisingly, my first thought on seeing was “Wow, what is a tomato doing here?” However, I was not foolish enough to eat it.
(we/us pronouns) Maybe the most fun was a rodent in our yard. We saw the movements (fast, infrequent). We observed low-hanging leaves disappearing into tunnels. The tunnels were carved out of old vegetation above the ground (Solidago). We camped out nearby on occasion over the course of two weeks with a camera. We eventually got enough mediocre photos to see the animal: the nose was not thin enough for a Shrew. The body was beefier than a Mouse and the ears were smaller. We decided on genus Meadow Voles. Community has identified it as a Meadow Vole. We believe we have found two others by observing similar behavior, another nearby and one in a park.
Maybe this one:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/90023372
It was the very ~first~ night in our new house, so we were very jazzed to see two buck nonchalantly wander into the back yard .
Since then, we’ve seen more coyotes in the yard than deer. We are thrilled to have them as there seems to be quite a lot of gophers.
Well, this one was cool, mostly because it came so close:https://inaturalist.ca/observations/97383118
This one was spotted while we were cooking dinner in the kitchen: https://inaturalist.ca/observations/96329186
The location makes this one: https://inaturalist.ca/observations/95267676
But this is my fave. Sphinx moths are just beautiful and their calmness about being handled makes observing them memorable: https://inaturalist.ca/observations/82158739
I would say mine is this California Black Oak. It is not a big or impressive specimen, as its species goes; but it is growing directly on the grave of Jack London. The ashes of the famous author and adventurer have been taken up by this tree’s roots, so in a sense, something of him lives on.
my hest observation is pf black headed ibis because they are kind of rare here and nesr threate6 in IUCN list
This past weekend, we saw a Canada Lynx for the first time. We had just come from observing Spruce Grouse for the first time ever and were not five minutes further down the trail (in a vehicle) when we crested a hill and saw the Lynx crossing the road. Our entire party was able to observe it, and we were in awe! We were unable to photograph it because it was visible so briefly. A member of our party, who is knowledgeable and resourceful, located its tracks in the snow, and we uploaded them as our observation. Prior to this year, we had never seen a wild cat; and since June 2021 we have seen Bobcat and Canada Lynx!
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