I’ve been out of town for a while, and was being kind of neglectful of the blog before that while I focused on the dashboard, so a lot of interesting photos have stacked up without my mentioning them here. I thought I’d do a quick roundup of some of the highlights from the last few weeks.
The Red-winged Blackbirds have been hanging around in their big winter flocks; it makes for a quick emptying of the feeders. As loughman1 and Dr. Glasscock’s correspondence indicates, the lack of personnel at Welder has meant that feeders sometimes take a while to be refilled.
This shot, taken by idbirds early on February 17, doesn’t have as many blackbirds in it as some shots I’ve seen, but it’s a really neat action photo:
On February 21, Zhang Yan was doing some work on the camera in connection with the conetester robot, in the course of which we temporarily got some views that we’re normally prevented from seeing by the game’s limits on movement. You can click through to the dashboard page to see some more (I’m now linking to the dashboard from the photos I post here), but here are a few interesting ones.
This shot of the area beyond the storage bin was taken by ottavia:
This closeup of the pole the camera is mounted on was also taken by ottavia:
Later on February 21, rafa got this shot of a bag of sunflower seeds:
The Blue Jay on the package was potentially identifiable in the game’s species list, and I added an ID for it, but apparently too many users were of a less-whimsical frame of mind, so “No Classifiable Species” won out in the ID. It made me chuckle, though, and reminded me of the Bald Eagle ID we temporarily had with CONE Sutro.
The following amazing sequence of a Cooper’s Hawk was photographed on February 23 by vanilla, vanilla, and robin54 (respectively):
This cool shot of a ladybird beetle on the camera’s housing was taken by rafa on February 24:
With all the Red-winged Blackbirds we’ve had lately, users have been getting really neat shots of the males flashing their epaulettes at each other. Here’s a shot that achadamaia took on February 25:
This pensive shot by rafa of a male Brown-headed Cowbird has a certain classical composition that I really like. The site’s users apparently agreed; it got 36 favorites points, making it the top shot of the day for February 28:
rafa’s cowbird shot got just one favorite point more than this shot by budgieface, one of several that showed not one, but two Great Kiskadees on the fountain. Given CONE Welder’s focus on documenting breeding-range changes by species like the kiskadee, it’s pretty exciting to see these shots. Is this pair of birds an actual pair? I’m looking forward to seeing if they show up together again in the future.
Overall, a really great batch of photos. Congratulations to everyone who took them!