I made a quick trip to the Riparian Preserve at Water Ranch (RPWR) to see the Black-and-white Warbler. I got there early and stayed a couple of hours. I didn’t find the warbler, but I’m posting a few pictures. The Black-necked Stilts were exhibiting behavior I hadn’t seen before. Usually they glide gently around the pond in search for food. This time they were fighting and diving on each other with their spindly red legs and backward bending knees flailing all over. I wasn’t close enough to get really sharp pictures, but tried to illustrate what I saw. I got real close to the Harris’s Hawk, but there was a twig in front of his face. As I was trying to move to a place where there was not a twig, he flew away.
It seemed to me there were a lot more photographers there than I’ve seen before. Every place I looked there were people with huge lenses taking pictures. What a bunch of bird nerds 🙂 . I talked to one guy (Dennis Pappas) who had two camera bodies, one with a Canon 800mm prime lens on a nice tripod with a Wimberly head, and the other with a Tamaron 150 – 600mm.  Pretty nice!
Here are the pictures:
4 Comments
Joe, these are great photos! Do you think it was maybe mating season for the Stilts?
Thanks – glad you liked them. I did a little research on the Stilts (google), but didn’t find an explanation yet. It says mating season for them is late spring or early summer, but maybe it’s different in the Arizona desert. They also don’t describe the kind of behavior I saw, but have pictures of them breeding.
Beautiful, you bird nerd.
Thanks! Those other guys are the bird nerds 🙂 .