Thursday, April 17, 2014

Birds and Iguanas

I've slowly been going through all the photos I took in Florida last week, close to 2,000 in all.  Still liking the bird photos from Wakodahatchee Wetlands the most, with the birds from the aviary at Butterfly World coming in a close second.  Now in the process of trying to identify the birds.  Like this little guy with the big yellow feet and striped neck:
A very lonnnggg neck when extended!
Update: I have since discovered the bird above is known as a least bittern, described here as "A tiny heron, furtive and surpassingly well camouflaged, the Least Bittern is one of the most difficult North American marsh birds to spot."  Sounds like I was pretty lucky to see this fellow!

And this pretty bird with the plume on his or her head:
Update:  This is a tri coloured heron with breeding plumage.

Both places had identifying signs posted, like this one:
which have been quite helpful to me after the fact, but the ones from the Wetlands don't show every bird that we saw that day. Which means I am Googling things like "bird with striped neck", hoping to match a name to the picture.

I went looking for "duck with orange beak" for this photo
and one of the results was (no surprise) this:

but it was quite easy to find out that these ducks are black bellied whistling ducks, thanks to this post by Kelly of Red and the Peanut (she has some great closeup shots of this breed).

What I didn't notice until I cropped this photo to get a closeup of the ducks was that there was a huge iguana in the grass right behind them, how cool is that??!
The same iguana we'd seen in a nearby tree earlier? Or a different one? Who knows? I did observe that they puff up that bit of skin under their chin when they are disturbed, as the one on the branch below only puffed up like that when a grackle landed on the end of the branch he was sitting on.
Before that, that piece of skin was nowhere in sight.
If you recognize either of the birds above, please leave a comment to help me out with this identification process! In the meantime, I'll keep looking.

1 comment:

Diane said...

Wow what wonderful pictures.

Hugs Diane