Amazing stills and video of snowy owls by Gerrit Vyn.

[via The Kid Should See This]

Common cranes fly over Venice, Italy. Amazing BBC footage. Zoom out, it’s worth it.

[via Coudal Partners]

My longtime flickr contact Bill Eaton caught a group of white ibises resting on a tree at sunrise. Wow.

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

Sophie and Liberty run into a “murmuration” of starlings. I must disagree (which I rarely do) with my most excellent source Jason Kottke, the quality of this video is perfect: it’s what my wife and I would make if we kayaked out to an island and caught a murmuration of starlings doing their thing. Including the look of awe and wonder on Liberty’s face at the very end. In many ways, I like this better than a highly produced National Geographic video.

Macedonia Brook State Park, Kent, Connecticut. Dave and I were hiking the other day and I spotted some unusual bark on a tree. On closer inspection the bark was riddled with woodpecker holes up and down the entire tree.

The bird is a yellow-bellied sapsucker and it really likes this tree. As you’ll see in the other pictures, the entire tree is riddled with holes, bottom to top.

Dave thought this tree was close to 100 years old so this is many generations of sapsucker action on it. No other trees in the area showed this kind of woodpecker damage except two other basswood trees a few hundred feet away.

As you’ll see in the last image the tree is still living, amazingly after such a riddling with holes.

Here’s David Attenborough blowing our minds describing what this bird can do. It’s quite amazing.

The second video is, well, a remix and it made me laugh hard enough so that I had to post this link. Go watch, first one first, second one second. Enjoy.

My long time flickr contact and even longer time friend Scott James has a nice set on hummingbirds. I particularly like the one I posted above, the hummingbird through the feeder is great.

My flickr contact Birdwatcher 1406 shot an outstanding image of two egrets on a dead tree.

My long time flickr contact Art is testing out Canon’s new EF 2X III Teleconverter with his 300mm lens. The feather detail on the chest of this female cardinal is extraordinary.

I wedged my iPhone inside a bird feeder and recorded an hour of video. I captured this awesome HD extreme close-up of a woodpecker eating seeds and battling a red-winged blackbird.

Looks like a red-bellied woodpecker. Great stuff.

[via Boing Boing]