Hawkish behavior

No, this is not a post about politics or the Presidential campaigning shenanigans that we are already suffering on a daily basis here in the U.S.A.  Rather, it is a post to share some pictures of juvenile Red-Tailed hawks that I took yesterday on the summit of Mount Lemmon at Steward Observatory's field station.  I had spent the better part of the day on the mountain working as we had a group of students from Catalina Foothills School District visiting us at the UA Sky School (you can see pictures here).  Following the students departure there was a group of three hawks that were playing near the summit.

The hawks often circle overhead, floating on the laminar airflow that rises over the western summit ridge line and flows to the east.  Sometimes they can 'surf' the air current and appear nearly motionless overhead for 10-20 seconds, or longer.  (It is this same laminar airflow that is a factor in our frequently excellent astronomical seeing conditions).  Below is an image of one of these hawks 'surfing' taken with my Canon 6d and a 70-200 mm lens at the 200 mm setting.  The exposure was 1/1600 of second at ISO 100, with an aperture of f/4.5.  Click on it for the full size image.

The picture below shows two of the hawks playing- the one on the left had landed in the tree and was then dive bombed by the one on the right.  I took the image a fraction of a second too late as I was hoping to get the hawk on the left still in the tree looking at the incoming hawk.  Both of these pictures are crops from the center of the original image but have not been reduced in size. (EDIT: Apparently, however, Blogger does compress them...)

Beep Beep!!

Wow...I avoided going 4 months between posts by two days!  I really need to prioritize posting more frequently but between an amazing job that has me working nearly every day between March 15 and May 30, spending my few free days with the family, and trying to learn to play guitar in between...well, the blog has just fallen off my radar.

I am working today so will keep this short and sweet.  This morning, I awoke to the noisy fellow below making a racket as s/he used our backyard as his (her?) personal hunting grounds and dining facility.  A quick search online and I learned that there is no easy way to identify the gender of the Greater Roadrunner from looks alone.  This particular noise monger is likely a juvenile, given the gray color of his facial skin.  When the roadrunner matures its facial skin becomes colored red and blue.  In any event, despite the cacophony, this young bird (in the cuckoo family) was obviously happy and satiated (shout out to the memory of the fence lizard) and did not at all mind me coming within about 10 feet for a picture.  He did not, however, agree to a selfie with me.

Hummingbird monitoring

I spent the weekend leading a group of students visiting the UA Science: Sky School up at Mount Lemmon.  On Sunday morning at sunrise some of the students assisted with the ongoing hummingbird monitoring that takes place at the Mount Lemmon SkyCenter every other weekend throughout the summer. The work is led by the The Hummingbird Monitoring Network, a research program with the ultimate goal of improving the chances for the long term survival of hummingbirds.

Birds are trapped, banded (if not already wearing a band), weighed, examined for general health, checked for pollen that may be in their breast feathers and all the data is logged into a database.  Prior to release, the birds are fed until they are satiated.  This last part was apparently enjoyable for the birds, as many of them took their time leaving post-feeding.  Those moments when volunteers were holding the birds in the palm of their hands, provided several fine opportunities to take pictures of the hummingbirds.  Click the images for full size, and if your browser automatically re-sizes images, click them again!