Photos from the past 40 years
Throwback Thursday travels back to Cheshire, England in May 1987.
Having documented the complete nesting cycle of a pair of Eurasian Blue Tit it’s now almost time for the young to be leaving the nestbox. It’s getting increasingly cramped and difficult for the adults to find somewhere to stand when feeding the young.
Throwback Thursday is a follow-up to last Tuesdays post.
Another shot of an adult Great Tit (Parus major) feeding recently hatched young. Taken using a specially constructed nestbox in Cheshire, England in the late 1980s.
One from the archives taken in Cheshire in the late 1980s.
Having documented the complete nesting cycle of a pair of Eurasian Blue Tits in 1987 I went on to photograph other species in different nestboxes over the next couple of years.
Here an adult Great Tit (Parus major) is about to feed some recently hatched young with a small yellow green caterpillar. While it looks as if the bird is looking at the camera it was just the timing of the shot. It was dark inside the nestbox, I was releasing the shutter a second or two after hearing an adult land at the entrance hole.
The new Weekly Prompt Photo Challenge is Old and New.
I had a few ideas for the challenge before thinking of some of my nestbox shots of adults feeding young.
This shot is quite a rare event with two adults in the nestbox together, normally there’s only a single adult in the nestbox once they’re feeding young. Taken using a specially constructed nestbox in Cheshire, England.
Two adult Eurasian Blue Tit feeding recently hatched young.
This week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge is Best of the year shot?
This has caused my some problems. As I have been doing a 52 week photo project this year do I pick one of my weekly picks? Another option is one of my 2018 shots that has been published elsewhere.
Then I discovered that some of the shots published elsewhere I was considering had been used in various posts during 2018. One had been a weekly pick and another had been a Wordless Wednesday post.
In fact I hadn’t decided which photo I was going to use when I started this post. Actually putting some of this down has helped me make a pick.
I’m going with my pick for Week 29. A bird in the rain.
Published in this blog on July 22nd it’s also the month of September in a 2019 birds calender and shows a young male Rose-breasted Grosbeak in the rain.
This week’s Cosmic Photo Challenge is The Food of Love.
I gave this some thought and then remembered this photo. It shows a fairly common piece of behavior for various species of Grebes that researchers and scientists have yet to fully explain.
The photo shows an adult Great Crested Grebe feeding one of its breast feathers to two of its young. One theory suggests this behavior is an aid to digesting their food by protecting their stomach from sharp fish bones. Another theory is that the feathers help the birds form pellets of undigested fish bones allowing them to regurgitate the pellets.
Sunday of week 29 started off dry until I set the camera up in the yard. Within 10 minutes it was spotting with rain and 15 minutes after that it was raining. It’s still raining as I write this post, I don’t think it’s stopped since it started.
We really needed the rain, it’s been so dry around here this summer the leaves are coming off the trees.
To the photo, it’s a young male Rose-breasted Grosbeak (Pheucticus ludovicianus) photographed on the South Bruce Peninsula, Ontario on a wet Sunday afternoon.
