Monday, January 9, 2012

Shoot Me Monday

While driving back to Tucson from Phoenix on Friday, I saw what I thought was black smoke in the sky.  "Something's burning," I told Gaby.  Then the "smoke" rapidly changed direction.  "Wait, those are birds!" I shouted.  This was a massive flock that seemed to go on forever.  As we approached, they flew right over us and eventually paralleled us for a while.  Gaby took some video on her point and shoot camera right after I first saw them.  I exited the interstate and Gaby and I took these photos.  It was truly amazing!  These photos show only a fraction of the whole spectacle.  There were 1,000's!

taken through the passenger window

taken at 100mm
taken at 400mm
Click here to watch the video

6 comments:

  1. Holy cow! What were they? That's a lot of birds!

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  2. The ones I saw at the end of the flock looked like Brewer's Blackbirds. Yellow-headed Blackbirds probably made up the majority of the huge wave I first saw while driving. They've been seen in large numbers in that area before. I'm told that the male Yellow-headed Blackbirds winter here and the females winter in Mexico.

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  3. What an awesome sight this must have been Jeremy!

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  4. Incredible! Did you enter this data into eBird and if you did...how?

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  5. Great question Kathie! I entered it as blackbird sp. by clicking on "Add Species" on the right-hand side of "Step 3: What did you see or hear?" I wanted to enter "1,000's" but it didn't let me, ha ha ha. So I estimated 13,000... conservatively. I'll let the eBird reviewers count the dots in the photos if they don't like my estimate. I'm not about to try!

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  6. Amazing! Glad you had your camera with you!

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