Two Ways of Looking at Dave Looking at a Bird



It's rare you get two viewpoints of stupidity, but Friday afternoon days at the park, Catherine and I spotted some kind of large raptor and it was behaving oddly: perching on low branches, walking around on the grass, acting dumbfounded and perplexed . . . it was weird; we couldn't tell if it was an eagle or an osprey (and now we think it was a Cooper's hawk) so I approached it and got very very close, and then it seemed as if it was going to fly right at me-- perhaps to tear my face off-- but it wasn't interested in me (or my face) and it turned out the bird was stalking a snake in the grass, which it finally grabbed with both claws and then flew off . . . perhaps it was a juvenile hawk and not sure if a snake was good eating; anyway, I got a good shot of the bird up close, and my wife-- from a safe distance-- got a good shot of me approaching the bird so here are both videos (as a side note, later that afternoon, when we were walking in New Brunswick, we saw a very tall young lady, her legs were just endless, wearing short shorts riding an adult sized electric powered kick-scooter . . . quite an afternoon, but we didn't get a video of that . . . or of the fat guy ambling down the street sporting a "Busy Doing Nothing" t-shirt).


4 comments:

  1. Based on my lousy screencap iNaturalist thinks it’s a short-toed snake-eagle, which sounds right until you look at their range. It also suggests the bird is a ferruginous hawk, which also has an implausible range for this sighting, and various owls, which it clearly isn’t. All this is to say that iNaturalist is as confounded by your bird as you are.

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  2. i've never heard of a screencap . . . i will google it. i assume it identifies things from pictures. definitely not an owl. i've already taken a picture of one of those.

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  3. Screen capture?

    Also, phone is short for telephone.

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  4. oh . . . i always say screenshot. you know i don't like abbreviations for things . . .

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