Examples below. Click on pictures for a larger image.
This is a great-tailed grackle, a much-hated bird in Austin, even though they are very pretty in bright light like this. Normally the males look completely black. These are birds that adapt well to humans, and in fact love noise and excitement, so they roost at night (in very large numbers) by preference in areas with lots of activity, like university campuses and shopping malls along I-35 with parking lots which ill-advisedly have a few trees for landscaping. If I buy groceries after dark at a nearby supermarket that fronts the freeway I make sure not to park under a tree. Everybody in Austin knows this, I suppose, but every once in a while as I emerge with my groceries I will notice a car, perhaps with out-of-state plates, parked under a tree and now seriously covered with grackle shit. (How often does anyone get to write "grackle shit" in a blog? Hmm. Google tells us the answer: 181 times before now.)
Anyway, quite a beautiful bird at times. Here are a few more:
Photo somewhere in Austin, I forget where.
This was in Comal Springs in New Braunfels, Texas.
Photo probably taken in my neighbor's back yard. My neighbor has horses. Grackles like horses as well as they like people.
This grackle was preening pretty exuberantly in a dead hackberry tree near my house.
6 comments:
Nice to see you blogging again! I'm glad I kept this site on my RSS feed. Beautiful photos. I don't see grackles in my neck of the woods, so I find them interesting from afar. Considering how many times the words "grackle shit" could have come up, 181 times isn't all much in our very modern techno universe.
I hope you'll keep posting.
That last shot is wonderful.
Curious as to your choice in presentation and not using Flickr. Just wondering what is your reasoning. I've gone back and forth but largely settled on using Flickr.
Juli, it's kind of arbitrary, I guess. Although I generally take multiple photos every day (a perk of retirement) I usually only upload one, and the sequence of uploads from day to day is not thematic. (I usually link to that one in facebook, as you know.)
If I take a bunch of family shots, or other shots that are in some way connected, I often upload those directly to FB.
I envision this blog possibly consisting of an initial photo taken recently with longer than usual commentary by me, and maybe some photos that are already in flickr like it.
But it's a good bet that whatever I presently envision will turn out to be a little different.
Jim, I bungled that. Wasn't very clear on my question. I was wondering what your reasoning was for not embedding the Flickr photos on your blog, not why you didn't just stick to Flickr for presentation. I went back and forth on my blog, wondering what to do, whether to upload the images to the blog itself or do the Flickr embed and finally opted to just embed the photos from Flickr. I know that's a fairly arbitrary decision. Some people upload images to their blog and some people embed from Flickr, each giving different reasons.
At any rate, look forward to your blogging again, whatever the subject matter. I forget what the occasion was but I found myself a couple of weeks ago relating your hilarious turkey story to someone.
It's been a while since I have used blogger, but my reasoning was if a person wanted to view a larger format of the photo than the one I chose for the blog format, they will actually go to flickr, usually with different text, often with comments, and a weird procedure for getting to various view sizes.
Plus if I am going back and using photos that are not in sequence on flickr, they can get lost on flickr, or find themselves several pages away from returning to blogger where the photos are in the sequence I want to present them. That would be the case the these grackle photos, all uploaded to flickr at different times.
Basically, it just seemed more complicated given what I was thinking of doing here.
Hi there, found this through a post on your old blog while searching for info on the legend of Zhaozhou Bridge. I really enjoyed reading your opinions on Birth of a Nation and Obama's presidency, very interesting and very well written indeed. And you have great photos on this site.
Mabel
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