A quick search of the blog turned up zip on today’s featured bird which is a tad bittersweet. On the sweet side this means an official new check mark in the bird list – yeah!. On the less sweet side it means I do not have any better pictures of this bird. If the Nuthatch shots in the previous post were a step forward, this just might be a tiny step backward (for the moment).
This has to be one of the easier birds to identify.
Not a lot of birds out there sporting a dominant color palette of orange and black. When you see one, most of us immediately think Baltimore Oriole. There are some variations of the Oriole and an orange bearing Redpoll, but for the most part this bird stands out on its own – and not hurt by having a Major League Baseball team named after it. Since the previous shot was rather weak when it comes to bird photography, I went in search of a better one. All the archives could produce .. of those processed to this point .. was the following flight shot which lacks some crispness on the body, but I do like the motion composition in the wings.
My major problem is every time I see one of these beautiful birds, I’m sans camera – cue the Pileated Woodpecker lamenting. Clearly they know this and just do it as a means to taunt me for not catering to their feeding needs. There are seed and nectar feeders in the yard, but no fruit feeders. They just seem like too much work for a limited number of opportunities to actually see them. At least the Hummers basically hang out in close vicinity – these Orioles are a bit of recluse in my opinion. According to Cornell, they do not prefer the deep forest which may be one reason we have limited access to them (we live in the middle of a forest). They do make one cool nest – looks like a hanging sack of string. There are no shots of one in this set, but there are a couple in the hopper from another shoot – at the time I didn’t know what bird it belonged to, but solved that while researching for this post.
Hit the jump to see some less than spectacular shots of the Oriole.
