I love the beautiful early morning light, the wildflowers blooming in the foreground, how the sunlight is kissing the tops of the grasses and mountain tops, the snow and the lovely, fluffy clouds.
Red-necked Grebes are beautiful but wary subjects in the Centennial Valley. Some day I hope I will have images the show off their beauty in a much better way.
Eastern Kingbirds; like their western counterpart, are fearless and will attack birds as large as Bald Eagles to defend their nests.
It won't be long before Swainson's Hawks start to migrate to South America and some may already have started their journey south.
Last month while up in Montana I saw this young Red-tailed Hawk just standing in the road looking around and not acting the least bit concerned about the pickup or the two large lens that were pointed at it.
Like this handsome Ferruginous Hawk that I photographed in the centennial Valley of Montana... On The Wing Photography has landed!
I saw and photographed my first Greater Sage-Grouse this summer in Beaverhead County, Montana while traveling through the Centennial Valley. Yay! Lifer!
Ferruginous Hawks west of the Continental Divide prefer rabbits as prey so what you see here might be the last thing a Cottontail or Jackrabbit might see.
Many of the adult Red-tailed Hawks that I saw and photographed in southwestern Montana on my last trip had worn feathers and were molting.
Red-tailed Hawks have the most variable plumages of North American hawks but Swainson's Hawks are also pretty variable, there are light morphs, intermediate morphs and dark morphs.
Last month and this month I wrote about Mountain Bluebirds in several posts that included images of adult males and females, today I am posting one image of the many fledglings I saw last week.
This adult Red-tailed flew by at close range which gave me a very nice view of the underside of its wing that shows it was also molting though it didn't look as raggedy as some of the other adult Red-tailed Hawks looked.
So I finally have images of the breeding plumage of this small shorebird that show the spots that gave this bird the name Spotted Sandpiper!
I had been looking at the shoreline where the tree line comes down to the river when I saw what appeared to be a large dark boulder move only the "boulder" had legs and the face of a Black Bear!
I photographed the adult Swainson's Hawk above after it had lifted off from a power pole in Beaverhead County and loved that I had thin clouds in the background which is far more pleasing to my eye than plain blue sky.
The Yellow Warbler in my image was singing along a creek lined with willows and although the bird is small in the frame I find this image appealing because of the simple lines, the bird's pose and the wonderful eye contact the bird gave me as it briefly looked towards me.
I readily admit that sometimes I daydream about being able to fly like a bird and quite often the bird I wish I were is a Red-tailed Hawk.
Great Horned Owls and old wood seem to go together like salt and pepper, stars and stripes or peanut butter and jelly, they are a great combination!
I want to thank Neil Paprocki for sharing information about Al Larson and the upcoming film The Bluebird Man, I have learned a lot from the web site and through my interview with Neil and I am all for learning more about the wonderful natural world around me.
I wanted to share some bird lift off images today so I rounded up a few that showed different styles of lift offs.
In early June while in western Montana there was a pair of Wilson's Phalaropes on a small, privately owned pond near a gravel road foraging for prey that I couldn't resist photographing.
I'm extremely fond of owls, it might be their forward facing eyes that draws me to them. Of course I love all birds but to me owls are special.
Earlier this week I was enthralled to see the Alaska Basin that straddles Idaho and Montana and winds through Beaverhead National Forest and Targhee National Forest.
I was photographing some Pine Siskins along a road in Madison County, Montana when this male Red-shafted Northern Flicker stuck his head out of his nesting cavity in an aspen and surprised me.
I saw several Tyrant Flycatchers on my last trip to Montana, Eastern and Western Kingbirds and a couple of Western Wood-Pewees that were hawking from fence posts and barbed wire along a gravel road.
There are issues with this image which I will cover shortly but I really liked the pose of this Red-tailed Hawk, the spread of the wings, the flared tail and the great eye contact I was able to capture as the Red-tail looked down towards me as it flew in a bright blue Montana sky.
Yesterday my post focused on female Mountain Bluebirds and today I am presenting males in honor of Father's Day. I was blessed to have two fathers, one who died when I was very young and later in my second Dad came into my life.
There were Mountain Bluebirds everywhere I looked on my recent trip to Montana where flashes of their brilliant blue plumage were a delight to my eyes.
Yellow-bellied Marmots are the western cousins of Groundhogs but unlike Groundhogs (Woodchucks) they aren't fabled critters that can predict spring and I am okay with that because spring gets here when it gets here.
This male Tree Swallow was perched on a fence post in western Montana last week when I photographed him while the morning light lit him up beautifully.