Category: Malheur Wildlife Refuge

Since the more familiar birds were absent, I spent most of my time at Malheur trying to photograph song birds which are generally much harder to photograph than larger birds since smaller birds survive by hiding in foliage and constantly being on the move. Luckily, I like the challenge of getting a good shot — or at least a recognizable shot of these kinds of birds.

Auto-focus is definitely a blessing to a bird photographer, but that’s not always a case with small birds hiding in foliage. The camera is just as apt to focus on a leaf as on the bird, and it has a hard time focusing on a fast-moving bird.

I’ll have to admit, though, that the camera saw this Yellow Warbler

better than I did with my naked eye. In fact, I couldn’t identify it until I looked at the shot on my computer.

I probably should have guessed it was a yellow warbler, though, because there were a lot of them at Malheur and most of them flew away as soon as I pointed a lens at them,

though occasionally I got lucky and found one so focused on attracting a mate or claiming its territory that it totally ignored me.

There are a lot of small birds at Malhuer when you’re focusing on seeing them. This flycatcher, a Western Wood-Pewee, I think, was totally indifferent to me, returning to the same branch after each attempt to catch an insect.

You also see a lot of birds at Malheur sitting on fence lines since that’s the highest point around. I first thought this was a Black Phoebe, but after a closer look I think it is an Eastern Kingbird,

a bird I very seldom see and might not recognize with a birding book.

I’ve already said that my favorite shots from the Malheur portion of the trip were those of the Snipes, birds I’d been pursuing in vain, for years. Another ambition I’ve had for several years now is to see the birds I see overwintering in Puget Sound where they live the rest of the year. I saw that last year when I got pictures of the grebes with babies on their backs.

This year I unexpectedly got shots of this female Common Merganser with her ducklings as I drove through the refuge.

It was actually a challenge to get these shots because the mother, naturally enough, tried to avoid me seeing her or her chicks. There was actually at least three or four more chicks, but there was no way I was going to get them all in a single frame. Most shots actually had huge blurry spots because the creek was edged with tall grass, but ‘burning’ those spot in Photoshop helped to even the tones out.

Even I could hardly avoid going â€?”Awww” as I took these shots; these might be the cutest ducklings I have ever seen.

I’m not going to make the same claim for these American Coot chicks, which seem about as adorable as a vulture with their bald, red heads and odd-color â€?”fur,” but they’re so homely that I do find them cute, and I don’t know of a more attentive parent,

or a more demanding child.

Unlike the Common Merganser, the American Coot seemed largely indifferent to me and my truck, so I was able to stick around and get all the shots I wanted.

Getting these shots as I was leaving for Big Bear capped off my two days at Malheur. It was a great two days.

Although driving your car is the only practical way to bird Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, getting out and walking parts of the refuge makes it possible to get shots you would otherwise miss, like this shot of what appeared to be a young Yellow Warbler [UPDATE: After an email from John and pretty well convinced that the top bird is NOT a warbler, the beak is too thick to be Warbler] and Brown-Headed Cowbird.

I must admit I was totally confused by the shot at first. [UPDATE: Perhaps confused was the correct state and I shouldn’t have tried to make a connection between the nearby Yellow Warbler and these two.] I thought that it had to be two young birds because of their behavior, particularly the fact that they stayed put rather than flying away when I shifted position to get a better shot through the heavy foliage. Most adults would fly away if they thought you were really interested in them, whereas chicks tend to freeze in place, hoping to avoid detection.

It was pretty clear that the two were different kinds of birds, though at first I thought it might be the heavy foliage that made them seem to be different colors and they were both immature Yellow Warblers and that was why this Yellow Warbler was so intent on attracting my attention away from them.

Although I saw adult Yellow Warblers both days at Malheur, none came nearly as close as this one did, trying to attract my attention. Naturally I obliged by following it away, getting the best shots I’ve managed all the while.

It wasn’t until I got home that looked more carefully at the â€?”chicks” that I realized the bottom bird was a Brown-headed Cowbird, a bird that lays its eggs in other bird’s nests, including the nests of Yellow Warblers. Although I’d heard about the phenomena, it really didn’t register until I looked at this photo. There’s quite a trove of information on the internet about the phenomena, it turns out.

Since Cowbirds often lay their eggs in the nests of Yellow Warblers, Yellow Warblers are often able to recognize that it is not their egg and they build another nest over the top of the nest with the egg to avoid hatching it. This mother, at least, didn’t seem to distinguish the difference between her own brood and the cowbird and was raising both as her own.

Seems kind of like a reverse Ugly Duckling fairy-tale, doesn’t it?