Sunday bird blogging

Like chocolate, penguin pictures are always a good idea.

These king penguins were going for a swim in Fortuna Bay, in South Georgia.

Sunday bird blogging

A rook perched on one of the sarsen stones at Stonehenge yesterday.

It's not a great picture, but at least I had a longer lens this year, so it's better than the tiny starlings I photographed there last year. At the time, I wrote, “I don't imagine I will ever get to post a picture of birds at Stonehenge again,” but I'll gladly make it a habit if I can.

Sunday bird blogging

A great horned owl from the aviary at Bolton Castle in North Yorkshire. This feel like a bit of a cheat, since not only was the bird a captive, it was also on the wrong continent. (Great horned owls are only native to the Americas.)

I got out of York for the day yesterday. Last summer I'd booked a day trip to the Yorkshire Dales from York, but I decided to skip it this year when I was rebooking everything. I reasoned that there was enough to do in the city and I wanted a more relaxed schedule. But when I was sitting in my hotel room Friday night after the hot, crowded day that felt 72 hours long, I thought, Hmm, I wonder if it's too late to book that trip to the Yorkshire Dales?

It wasn't, and it turned out that a day driving through beautiful countryside and charming villages was exactly what I needed. It wasn't quite as hot yesterday, but outside of the city the weather was merely pleasantly warm, and we saw sheep and ate a lot of cheese and visited this castle, where Mary Queen of Scots was held prisoner for six months in 1568. (I did not attempt to climb the series of stone spiral staircases going up to the chamber where she lived. It would have taken me longer than six months to get down again.)

I've really lost all sense of time. The Minster bells have been ringing nonstop for the past half hour and it took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that it was Sunday.

Sunday bird blogging

Another flashback to Hilton Head and a great blue heron.

Sunday bird blogging

An anhinga drying its wings after a dip in the Atlantic in Hilton Head in 2019.

Sunday bird blogging

Another Alaska picture: a kittiwake in Prince William Sound in 2014.

Sunday bird blogging

A brown skua hanging out on King George Island in 2018.

Flashback: Milford Sound

Most of the pictures I never went through from New Zealand were of Milford Sound, and I made an executive decision that I didn't need any more waterfalls.

But I did like this picture: looking out the mouth of the sound to the Tasman Sea while a lone albatross looks for fish. And that fog, just waiting offshore.

Sunday bird blogging

I don't seem to have any interesting Australian birds to post; fortunately I will never run out of penguins!

These king penguins were in St. Andrew's Bay in South Georgia.

Sunday bird blogging

I was looking for something else and stumbled across a few hundred unprocessed pictures from Australia ten years ago, including this pretty pigeon in Cairns: a Torresian imperial pigeon, aka Australian pied imperial pigeon.

Sunday bird blogging

I haven't taken a long lens to Central Park in a long time; it's just too heavy to lug around when walking is already problematic.

So this grackle is from a few years ago. The picture is noisy, and not as sharp as it could be, but hey, it's a bird. And I do love those mean yellow eyes.

Sunday bird blogging

We're in the middle of the latest Snowmageddon (though our part of it seems to be more sleet than snow now—I'm not going to go out to investigate) so a penguin seems appropriate. This gentoo was dancing around the whale bones at Mikkelsen Harbor.

Sunday bird blogging

Since we've been revisiting Cierva Cove, here are some more of its resident gentoos, just enjoying their penguiny lives.

Another OMG I missed this!

I had previously posted a video showing one of the gentoos flying out of the water and landing on the rocks. (You get some idea of how crazy fast they can move through the water by the amount of momentum they have when they're leaving it.)

This picture captures two penguins in midair, about to land. I missed it at first—oh look, more penguins—but the water trail caught my eye and I realized what I was looking at.

And some gentoos too

I've already posted many pictures of the mobs of gentoos along the shoreline in Cierva Cove, but this pair were hanging out by themselves on an ice floe.

This landscape of unbroken ice and snow is more like what most people imagine Antarctica looks like, but there's really less snow than you'd think in the summer (and less every year.)

And still more chinstraps

There weren't as many chinstraps as there were gentoos in Cierva Cove, and we didn't get as close to them. This picture brings it all back, and I love the wild water with the bergy bits floating in it.

More chinstraps

Bonus bird blogging

Cierva Cove was the only place I saw chinstrap penguins in Antarctica on this trip (there was one in South Georgia).

Sunday bird blogging

I planned to start going through some of my photo backlog this week, and I was going to start with South Dakota. But it's Sunday, and time for some birds, and I was sure I had plenty of penguin pictures I'd never posted, so I went to the Antarctica folders instead.

And found more than 100 photos I'd never even processed from Cierva Cove alone. Many of them, it's true, were ignored for good reason, but there are some gems there as well. Such as these rather mundane icebergs, which turned out to have a gentoo porpoising in the background.

Sunday bird blogging

A timid fledgling robin peeking out from under a bench in Hell's Kitchen last summer.