An Exciting Month At Cattail Chronicles
Here is a first for us. We learned a new word and saw a relatively rare bird. The word is leucistic. It is a genetic deficiency resulting in a lack of pigment. The reason we needed to learn this new word is that we had a young leucistic red-winged blackbird. While many of the images of leucistic black birds are not entirely white. There are white patches at various locations on the birds. Ours was completely white.
Photographing the American Dipper
The target for our vlog video this afternoon was Gateway Natural Area. We had wanted to return for a couple of reasons. The first and biggest was to see if the Pygmy Owls had returned to nest in the picnic area. The second was to photograph Kingfishers, of which we had seen plenty in past visits. These goals were not to be met. Well, mostly not met. A park ranger would distract us by dangling the offer to see an American Dipper’s nest. The offer was way too tempting.
In Search of Newborn Animals
It was a beautiful spring day. We decided to go out and scout some local locations for future YouTube videos. To make it more interesting we made it a goal to find newborn critters to photograph. We did find a few but we were for the most part a little early.