Signs of Spring
Click on the photo for a larger image
All photos are ©2004 by Dave Palmer, and may not be used without permission
Main photo page
The Beast in the Cactus...Revealed!
It was a bird, a mockingbird to be exact (I could tell it was a mockingbird, because every time I came near,
it would yell out things like, "hey Ansel Adams! Nice camera! How many skee-ball tickets did it cost you?").
This particular type of bird uses camouflage rather than flight in dealing with intruders. When something approaches the nest,
it skootches down into a non-birdlike shape and then just freezes. Even when you're just a couple of feet away, it doesn't move a muscle, hoping that
you don't recognize it as something edible.
And when I came by one day when the bird happend to be gone, I found a clutch of eggs...
...which soon hatched into four little fuzz balls. At first, I thought the chicks would be impossible to photograph,
because they were just little gray blobs that didn't move at all and were all but invisible in the nest.
Then I accidentally bumped the cactus, and the vibration made the chicks think it was feeding time:
But a week or so later, the camouflage instinct had finally kicked in, and they finally started hiding when I came near.
PAGE: 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5
