Some bird photos are good because they are beautifully detailed shots that show you all the features of the bird. Some bird photos are good because they're fun.

This is absolutely the best photo of a dark-eyed junco I have ever taken.

ok I think we all need some cute bird pics today so here are some of my recent bird friends

this year's AOS announcement about bird species in north america has been released, and there's some big news! the common and hoary redpolls have been lumped into a single species! (along with the lesser redpoll)

from the various reading about redpolls I've done, I think this is a very good move, and I'm glad to see it's backed up with genetic analysis as well.

some of the other changes are very interesting too, but imo the redpoll news is the most interesting!

https://americanornithology.org/65th-supplement-to-check-list-of-north-american-birds-publishes-in-ornithology/

the latest update to the AOS's resolution to change all eponymously-named English bird names for north american and central american bird species is a very interesting read!

https://americanornithology.org/english-bird-names/aos-pilot-project-to-change-harmful-english-common-bird-names/

I think they're doing a great job of talking through what's behind the move, what complications are having to be dealt with, and what care is being taken in developing the process for changing the names. Including starting with a pilot project! (I love pilot projects.)

I was also delighted to learn from this latest article that one bird species I know and love, the long-tailed duck, is actually one that had its name changed in the year 2000 due to its previous name including an offensive word! The current name is such an obvious, clear, and useful name. I'm glad they made that change and I look forward to more changes like it.

ebird does such a good job of making you want to put more sightings into it. make numbers go up! get more numbers this month than the same month last year! get more numbers this year than last year! get more in your home region this year than last year! and so on

and it all goes into having better data available for academics and scientists to work from in studying birds! CITIZEN SCIENCE benefitting the environment!

the entirety of how I use instagram: my partner sends me links to cool bird related posts, I click and watch this curated-just-for-me bird content and grin in delight at how amazing birds are, I click like and close the app

today my dad shared a link to an article in the family group chat, and the article happened to have a photo with a couple birds in it, so my sister teasingly asked me what birds they were

which then required me to download the Australia bird pack on merlin and familiarize myself with the birds of Tasmania because OBVIOUSLY I couldn't leave that question unanswered!

anyway the birds were one eastern rosella and two noisy miners, and I got to learn fun facts about birds I'd never heard of before

the thing about snow buntings, as I was reminded by a friend recently, is that they hang out in a flock. there will be one flock in a region, so if you're not in the right place to see the flock hanging out together, you will simply not see any snow buntings at all. makes it hard to get the chance to see any!

seeing either snow buntings or snowy owls requires a lot of driving slowly down country roads staring hopefully at fields, but at least there will be multiple locations that will have a snowy owl!!

my family: give me a gift with a stylized bird design on it, then joke about me identifying it

me: well it's definitely a passerine, and given the posture it's almost certainly not a flycatcher or wren, and it has a fairly chunky beak so being a grosbeak or finch or perhaps sparrow seems likely,