Anne Elliott's photos with the keyword: white eye-ring

Posting this photo simply for the record. Usually, if I see a Townsend's Solitaire, it is high up at the top of a tree or shrub. This time, we saw one that was down on the snowy ground near the edge of the Bow River in Carburn Park. The actual colour of this bird is more grey than it looks in my photo. "The Townsend’s Solitaire is an elegant, wide-eyed songbird of western-mountain forests. Their drab gray plumage gets a lift from subtly beautiful buffy wing patches and a white eyering. Though they're thrushes, they perch upright atop trees and shrubs to advertise their territories all year long, and can easily be mistaken for flycatchers. Their sweet jumbling song gives them away and enlivens their evergreen forest and juniper woodland homes. In winter they switch from eating primarily insects to eating fruit, particularly juniper berries." From AllAboutBirds. www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Townsends_Solitaire/id I actually got out on a birding walk with a group of friends two mornings ago. Quite a photographic leap from the hot rainforest of Trinidad (previous photo) to the cold, winter sights of Calgary. One look at the weather forecast for this week and I decided that, if I was going to head over to Carburn Park, I had better do it (two mornings ago). The temperature was a balmy PLUS 1C-3C! Today, 10 January 2018, it is snowing again and the temperature is -22C (windchill -31C). Crazy weather. Just noticed that tomorrow morning is supposed to be -29C (windchill -37C). The light was not good for photos on this walk and most of the birds were very distant, as usual, at this location. Funny how it always works - if one is walking along the edge of the river, the birds are mainly on the far side. We did see 29 bird species, though. Later in the day, a friend very kindly picked me up and we went to the meeting about the recent Christmas Bird Counts. What an enormous amount of detail and facts are collected each year - most impressive and very useful!

Lol, a really bad photo of a very distant Townsend's Solitaire, but I only have one other photo of this species on Flickr - and it's even worse than this one. Taken at Bebo Grove, Fish Creek Park, on November 15th. www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Townsends_Solitaire/id

Another cropped view of the little Vesper Sparrow we heard and saw at Confluence Park a week ago. Not exactly the most photogenic surroundings, but I was just happy to get a few photos of this little Sparrow. By the way, something weird has been going on with Flickr the last three or four days. I don't know if my "new" updates are not showing up on some people's Home Page or if there is something else not happening. I do know I only received one comment in a space of 15 hours, which is most unusual and very strange : ) If anyone happens to have noticed anything, either with my photostream or their own, it would be really interesting to hear : )