BRDL 13-15

 2/5/22 - PABU - Painted Bunting

These birds are incredible - colorful, beautiful. They were the first bird I targeted when we went visited Boynton Beach, Florida for the first time, and I saw them at the feeders at the Green Cay Nature Center. Love that place, and its nearby nature preserve - Wakodahatchee Wetlands. The city of Boynton Beach has taken their water treatment plants and created wetlands right next door. They treat the city water, then pump it out into the wetlands for further filtering. Then they built boardwalks for a mile or two and you can get right up close to loads of nesting egrets, herons, storks...

But this post is about the Painted Bunting. Here's what I never knew -- there are two main populations of Painted Buntings, one along the the east coast of Florida, that migrates north to Georgia and South Carolina, and the other in Mexico, that migrates north to Texas and Oklahoma. As far as I can tell they are subspecies, but they haven't done the genetic testing to figure out if they are completely separate species.

Either way -- incredibly beautiful birds. My amateur photography needs some practice, but you get the picture.

2/6/22 - PUMA - Purple Martin

I've only seen purple martins down in Florida, at the same Green Cay mentioned above. In the east, the purple martins reportedly live mainly in big nest boxes, whereas in the west they live in natural crevices and caves. There's a lot of info online about how to build purple martin houses to attract them -- they mainly eat insects and need large bodies of water so they can fly along and scoop up water as they go. Makes me think it would be fun to put up a house near our local reservoir and see what we attract, but they're pretty rare up this way in Massachusetts.

At least I have one of my own photos from Florida -- still have some work to do!

2/7/22 - LAAL - Laysan Albatross

So far as BRDL goes, this one was tough. Only two letters in the code. And I had forgotten that I have actually seen these birds during a trip to Kauai in 2017. Fun fact about these birds -- the oldest living bird known right now is a Laysan Albatross that was named Wisdom that is at least 70 years old, that nests on Midway Island in the Pacific. Apparently these birds return every year to the same patch of sand to nest. This one has been coming back for a long, long, long time. Photo below

By John Klavitter/U. S. Fish and Wildlife Service - http://gallery.usgs.gov/tags/NR2011_03_08, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14580487