Anne Elliott's photos with the keyword: Myadestes townsendi

This young White-tailed Deer was hanging out with its mother and sibling yesterday afternoon, when I joined friends for a 3-hour walk in Fish Creek Park. As you can see, there is so much snow on the ground! Difficult walking if one goes off the main path in the park. Even more snow this morning, after getting yet another snowfall overnight. Thankfully, the snow removal vehicles have just driven along the street where I live. Wish everyone would move their vehicles from the street so that the snow removers can clear closer to the curb! There were not many birds to see on the walk and I got just a very distant shot of a Townsend's Solitaire that landed in a low tangle of thin branches the far side of the creek. Really just a walk for exercise and the company of friends. The sun was shining and it really was a beautiful day.

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!

Fully zoomed and seriously cropped, as this Townsend's Solitaire was on a spruce tree down on the hillside at North Glenmore Park the other morning. I rarely get any kind of shot of this species, so wanted to add this to my Birds of Alberta set. It's white eye-ring shows up in this photo. www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Townsends_Solitaire/id en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Townsend's_Solitaire

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