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| Robin Eating a Pokeweed Berry, Sunset Parkway |
I don't know what was so special about this pokeweed plant, but it's the first one I've seen whose fruit was being eaten by birds. It seems a few other animals also eat the berries, but they are poisonous to humans. My wife recently made ink with the berries from a plant near home.
I enjoyed trying to get a shot of the robins with a berry in their beak. The birds were plucking and swallowing them very quickly. In the photo above, you can see movement in the lower beak even in this 1/1000th sec. exposure.
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| American Robin |
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| Berry-plucking |
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| The background behind the plant is from houses on the far (west) side of Sunset Boulevard. |
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| Red-shouldered Hawk Taking Wing |
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| I could hear the squirrel rasping on something and couldn't really figure out what was causing the sound. The red berries had hard pits, but they seemed too small for a squirrel to rasp on. The sound was similar to when they gnaw into pine cones. Maybe it was eating the branches? There were pieces of branches on the ground, but I didn't think to check them for teeth marks. |
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Western Flycatcher Nabbing An Insect
The flycatcher is the only shot I took on my bike ride; everything else came from my walk. I'm surprised I've encountered interesting subjects (interesting to me, at least!) so often recently. Even when there's a drought of subjects, though, just being out in the weather for a few hours makes for a very gratifying morning. |
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