Return of Bird of the Week: Beryl-spangled Tanager
If WC has counted correctly, we’ve featured 25 weeks of Tanagers. And while we’re a long ways from exhausting tanagers – we haven’t touched on Mountain Tanagers yet, or tanagers that aren’t called “tanagers” – WC will move to a different family of birds next week. But let’s close out tanagers with a spang(le), specifically with the spectacular Beryl-spangled Tanager. WC’s first sighting of the species was pretty unusual. We were walking along a grassy river corridor at about 2,000 meters on the east slope of the Andes in Ecuador, just below Guango Lodge. There was a commotion in a…
Gov is definitely NOT scared of the recall. Definitely.
OH, LOOK! No worries about changing the name of this newsletter any time soon, because they just can’t get over the fact that he’s tall. A new pro-Dunleavy group has sprouted up like a mushroom in the night. “Stand Tall With Mike” has just registered itself with the Alaska Public Offices Commission as a political group whose mission is to “oppose signature collection effort to recall Governor Dunleavy.” You know – the signature collection effort that the governor is completely not worried about and was totally not the reason for the ouster of his former chief of staff, Tuckerman…
Return of Bird of the Week: Vermilion Tanager
Not to be confused with the similarly colored but unrelated Vermilion Flycatcher, the Vermilion Tanager is a bird of the eastern slopes of the Andes. It’s another canopy species; this is another photo from a steep hillside, looking at downslope treetops. Yes, the shot was photobombed by a Golden-naped Tanager, but that’s a pretty good bird, so WC let it pass. The bird was pretty far away, the crop is pretty heavy and both photos demonstrate a hazard of birding in a cloud forest: clouds. Still, it doesn’t get much more red than that. Unusually for a tanager, this species…
Return of Bird of the Week: Opal-crowned Tanager
The Opal-crowned Tanager is a canopy dweller, spending its life in the upper third of mature jungle canopy in the mountain lowlands of Ecuador and Peru. The only times WC has seen it has been in a canopy tower, or on a steep hillside where a road give you a view of the downslope treetops. This view, poor as it is, is one of those hillside glimpses. The bird is unmistakeable, with that opal band around the crown of the head, dark blue-black back and electric blue body. Some ornithologists group this species with its cousin, Opal-rumped Tanager, in a…
They’re back! Personnel problems
One thing you can say for Alaska – we know how to recycle. We may not do that well with aluminum cans, but politics? That’s another story. RECYCLE! Remember the guy that Gov. Dunleavy nominated to be the Commissioner of Administration and who got a little too creative with his resume and lied to the Senate by claiming that he was a frozen yogurt entrepreneur which he wasn’t, and eventually had to withdraw in shame? Well, he’s back. Jonathan Quick has now shown up as a candidate for the Kenai Borough Assembly. There’s just been a complaint filed with the…
Return of Bird of the Week: Silver-beaked Tanager
Yes, still with the tanagers. After all, there may be as many as 240 different species, although WC has so far photographed only a fraction of them.[^1] But staying with the silvery theme, meet the Silver-beaked Tanager. The bill is indeed bright silver, distinguishing the species from the Silver-backed Tanager and the Silver-throated Tanager. Maybe it’s a failure of naming imagination. It’s also one of the tougher birds to properly expose in a photograph. The silver, in anything but the lowest light, is almost mirror-like and if you drop the exposure enough to get any detail there, all detail in the black…
When it’s quiet in Juneau…
Any parent of a toddler knows that feeling when you’re going about your business, and suddenly you realize… it’s been quiet for a while. Welcome to this week. We’re in between special sessions 2 and 3 (TBA) and a hush has fallen. Enjoy the quiet because pretty soon we’re going to discover WHY. TAKING IT TO THE PEOPLE Since deciding that the press is mean and fake (wonder where he came up with THAT?) Dunleavy has decided that he’s now going to just deliver the real news to the people directly from the government. That’s how it’s supposed to work…
The Chosen One, the Unchosen One, and the Recall
TALL TALES from Juneau Eyes on the Dunleavy Disaster THE CHOSEN ONE The unexpected passing of Senator Chris Birch (R-Anchorage) on August 8 left a vacancy in the Alaska State Senate. Literally the next day, one of the Reps in his district, Laddie Shaw (R-Anchorage) was already vying for the seat stating it would be “an honor” to continue the work that Birch began. Only one problem, Shaw and Birch were on opposite sides of “the work.” Birch was an industry guy, and a moderate Republican who showed up in Juneau to do his job during the infamous special session…
Return of Bird of the Week: Silver-throated Tanager
Not to be confused with the Silver-backedTanager or the Silver-beakedTanager, The Silver-throatedTanager is a bird of the highlands of Costa Rica and Panama and the cloud forests of the northern and central Andes in South America. The bird’s plumage is unusual beyond the silver throat. Not many Tangaraspecies – the largest genus of Tanagers – have striping or barring, let alone a black line around that fancy silvery bib. In the tropics, where the variety of bird species can be bewildering, this bird is unmistakeable. There’s nothing like it. There are three subspecies; these first two are probably icterocephala, the southernmost….
Return of the Bird of the Week: Flame-colored Tanager
Don’t confuse the Flame-coloredTanager with the Flame-crested Tanagerfeatured a couple of weeks ago. Yes, the names are confusingly similar, but the birds certainly are not. The male is to the left; the badly out-of-focus bird to the right is the female. This tanager is different from the last sixteen or so in a couple of ways. First, this is the first tanager that sometimes occurs in the United States. It’s rare, but it has been seen several times in southern Arizona and west Texas. The regular range is northern Mexico to western Panama. The second difference is that ornithologists are unsure…