One of my favourite questions is “how do we know what we know?” This fascinates me both as a historian and as an environmental educator. I love seeing range maps for different species. I really enjoy using iNaturalist, and clicking on the profile of a species to see where else other users have logged seeing them. But how did people, historically, get a sense of the range of migratory animals like many bird species? That’s where bird banding comes in.
Bird bands are little metal bands attached around the legs of captured birds. They include text about the bird and where it was banded, and usually direct the finder to send in the band along with information on where the bird was found. They can create discrete data points. Birds first started to be banded…
Last month I posted about some wolf tracks I’d found and thought pretty neat. I know wolves live in this area from tracks and scat, but I rarely see or hear them. To illustrate, here are a few photos I took yesterday of fresh-ish wolf sign spotted along a ski trail.
Wolf tracks and urine along a packed down ski trailBounding through the snowCasual pace on one side of the trail, leading to the bounding tracks in the left hand image.
However, last week, in one evening, I had multiple wolf encounters. They legitimately left me reeling, emotionally. There’s something about wolf encounters that just get to me.
First off, for context: I live and work in a national park (obligatory disclaimer: these thoughts are my own, this is my private blog, I am not currently being paid to promote/express opinions/etc. on behalf of Parks Canada). This time of year, I’m doing a lot of paperwork. But I occasionally get unleashed from my basement office to go out and deliver programs, including some private bookings. Most of the private bookings I’ve been doing have been guided, off-trail snowshoe hikes and stargazing experiences. I did take a booking, months in advance, for a wolf howl program. This is one of the longest-running programs in the park; inspired by the famous wolf howls of Algonquin provincial park, the interpreter takes visitors out into the park in a car caravan and stop at various points to howl for wolves and see if they’d howl back. I had seen this program delivered five or six times, and each time I attended (late summer/fall), we had never heard anything. I think there’s like a 20% success rate of wolves responding – which is still a thrill. In any case, I specifically taught myself a version of this program for this group, and planned to pair it with a stargazing program at a beach picnic area at the far end of the road I was taking this group on. The group’s organizer knew that there was a low possibility of hearing wolves, especially if the pack had already had their pups (they don’t howl at certain times of year, so as to avoid advertising the location of their den). In any case, the group was excited for a nighttime adventure!
Being a relatively organized person, a few hours before the start of the program I reviewed and revisited my route to ensure I had the timings correct, as well as to dig the snow out of the firepit I’d planned on using and double-check the firewood situation. (I like to look like I know what I’m doing when I step confidently out of the vehicle during the program.) As I drove along the road about an hour before sunset, the trees part and I get a glimpse of the lake. And then I see movement.
Now these could have been coyotes, but reviewing the footage and seeing the size of these animals relative to the size of the ravens (crows migrate south and aren’t found this time of year in this region), plus the way they move… I was fairly confident these were wolves. And I was thrilled. It looks from the video that they have some sort of carcass – I presume a deer from the size, but honestly, even zooming in this much strained my cell phone’s capabilities. These wolves were like at least half a kilometre away from me by my estimation. In any case, seeing these individuals confirmed that I was taking my group to the right place later on; I’d asked colleagues who do environmental monitoring in the park and they’d confirmed they see a lot of wolf sign in this area, like I did when I took visitors out snowshoeing off trail.
So as I meet my group after supper, the sun has set and it’s evident the sky will be overcast for the duration of our meeting. Even so, we could see a glimpse of the bright pinpricks of Jupiter and Venus through the cloud cover, and the group was keen and the weather a relatively mild -15C. Our banter was on point. We drove for a few kilometres, stopped at a turnoff by a creek, and gathered in silence to howl. We had one fellow howl – very convincingly. No response. After another two minutes, three of the group howl. We wait, straining our ears. Nothing, probably. And then we howl as one big group… and about five of us, including me, think we hear something, very faintly. It was hard to tell, because when you’re really listening hard, all you can hear is the swish of snowpants and the crunch of snow as someone shuffles their feet impatiently. I was half convinced it was my imagination, except that several other people all said they heard it too, and pointed in the same direction.
No matter. We hop in the vehicles, drive another ten minutes down the road, and hop out in the parking lot of the picnic area and beach where we’ll do our stargazing. We hop out, and repeat our routine, starting with one person with a strong voice howling solo. And not even 20 seconds afterwards, we get a faint but very distinctive howl back. It’s from the direction of where I saw those wild canines on the kill earlier, and it is very clearly a wolf howl. Three-quarters of the group hear it and we are all trying to be muted in our excitement. Three more of us howl, and once again, we get a very clear response back. When we howl as a bigger group the third time… yes, we hear them again! I was really trying not to show how surprised I was but honestly, I was thrilled. The first time I delivered that program, and we got such a clear answer? I was as excited as my audience was.
At that point, I set up for the stargazing program. The sky was overcast with glimpses of stars, and I was worried we’d be relying entirely on my voice and storytelling ability. I did come across as a bit of a hero by being able to successfully light a fire with a magnesium fire striker in only three strikes, in front of a group of 30 people staring at me, so that was great! But as I set up the fire, a bunch of us noticed a faint glow on the horizon line, in an area where the clouds were parted. I took a quick photo on my phone, and sure enough, it showed up in green: the aurora borealis had made an appearance.
So that was lovely! Again, I had built up a good rapport with the group and we were still high on excitement from the wolves howling back at us, so I think they would have been receptive to my storytelling and star charts even in the absence of stars to gaze at, but the aurora certainly helped build excitement! Overall, a fantastic evening for those visitors, who left very pleased by the experience.
Once I got back into town, stowed my equipment, and walked home, I was fairly jubilant but tired. I was in that kind of floaty, punchy kind of mood, coming down off of a busy, exciting day. It was later at night – around my bedtime in fact – and I was almost at my front door when I stopped dead in my tracks. I thought I’d heard something. I’d been really attuned to the “soundscape” (sound landscape) around me all night, but my footprints in the snow had been loud. I took out my phone and started filming just in case I heard it again, and… this is what I heard:
You may have to turn up your volume, but I can tell you that this wolf howl was very distinct in person, and sounded noticeably closer than when I’d heard them howling earlier during the program. I almost never hear wolves in town and it was both eerie and thrilling. I didn’t feel like I was in danger, but I had a mad moment where I asked myself if the wolves had followed me, if I’d been calling them to me.
Then I went inside and went to bed.
I talked about this experience with a few people the next day. I sent the two above videos to my family, and I have to say, my sister out in Vancouver had a hilarious response. She sent me this:
And you know, it doesn’t quite capture my experience – I didn’t really feel like I was particularly in danger. But I have to laugh that that was the perception. But there’s something about that very cheerful, positive dog in the second panel that speaks to me.
In any case, don’t be afraid to explore natural spaces after dark! Be safe, be prepared, make sure others know where you are, and go as a group… but try turning off your lights and opening up your ears to the world around you. You never know what you might hear.
You should check out my favourite documentary about wolves (and bison, which is in-character for me): Cold Warriors: Wolves and Buffalo, following a wolf pack hunting in Wood Buffalo National Park.
I talk to visitors a lot about wildlife sightings. One animal that often gets confused for another is coyotes for wolves. We have both wolves and coyotes in this area, and both occasionally even come into town. I frequently see coyotes trot past my front window. I’ve had people be very insistent to me that they’ve seen a wolf, but when they show me a photo, I see the coyote’s distinctive, pointy face. Or they’ll tell me they heard wolves howling last night when they were lying awake in their tent, and when they play me a recording, I hear the distinctive yips and higher pitched yowls of a coyote instead of the long slow deep wolf howl. A few years ago, I caught a decent video clip of the black coyote that’s been hanging around town on film. I still get folks telling me it’s a wolf – though everything about its silhouette screams coyote. It helps my confidence that I also heard it yowling and yipping in that coyote way both before and after I took this video – it’s why I was filming in the first place, because I was hearing a “conversation” between two sets of coyotes.
— Lauren (Bison Nerd) Markewicz (@HistoryBoots) October 15, 2021
In any case… the confusion people have in identifying wolves versus coyotes is to some extent understandable. I think a lot of people who have only ever seen photos or videos of wolves don’t exactly realize the actual scale of wolves. I think they imagine them to be closer in size to a German shepherd or another medium-largish dog – coyote size. That isn’t quite right. As an extreme example, take this clip from the PBS documentary on bison hunting wolves in Wood Buffalo National Park. The wolves in that video to be fair are likely among the largest in the world (as the wolf populations in that area are the only ones in the world that have never had the predator-prey relationship between wolves and bison interrupted), but those wolves are absolutely massive. You can see that when they’re up against full grown bison. Some of those males may be five or six feet tall at the hump. Wolves can potentially be incredibly large, and are overall far more robust than coyotes.
All of this is to say, when I see wolf tracks, you can tell they’re wolves. A few days ago I was scouting out some locations for an off-trail snowshoe hike I’m leading next week. I hopped out of my vehicle, put on my snowshoes, walked two steps, and then looked down and was suddenly struck by the size of some large canine tracks. There were no fresh human tracks nearby, and the tracks followed the road for a short while before disappearing into the bush and across a small frozen lake. This was a wild animal. And its feet were huge.
These tracks were easily the width of my hand, even with my fingers partially spread. Absolutely amazing to me! One helpful identifier I was taught that I find helpful is the “knuckle trick”. In terms of wild canids, fox tracks are about two knuckles wide, coyotes three knuckles, and wolves four or more. (This works with my size of hands as a rough guide.) Of course, you can have domestic dogs which present as all sorts of sizes, but in that case, it’s always best to look at overall behaviour. I look for equally fresh human tracks, for instance, or evidence of frolicking in winter. (It’s not that wild animals don’t play, but generally, if they’re really having a fun time and running all over the place, that’s an animal that isn’t worried about where its next meal is coming from and isn’t afraid to expend energy in the depths of winter.) I find that wild animals like coyotes often have tracks that look like they’re on a mission, striking out in a straight line across the landscape. In any case, behaviour is a key indicator to help confirm an identification.
Regardless, I was absolutely thrilled to have stumbled across fresh wolf tracks!
Last week I was going for my daily constitutional (I try to go for at least one walk a day, even if it’s miserable weather), and I had what I would refer to as a “significant wildlife sighting.” I was actually speaking on the phone with my sister at the time, and saw movement far off down the road. I hadn’t brought binoculars with me (my first mistake!!) but I used the zoom option on my phone to get a better look. I had initially assumed it was a coyote. Then I got a better look at the silhouette.
That is no coyote
I quickly realized that it was a lynx, told my sister I’d have to call her back, hung up without listening to her answer, and settled in to watch. This photo is extremely zoomed in and was taken with my cell phone. I really didn’t want to bother it so I didn’t walk more than 20 or so feet forward – it was several blocks down. I took a few photos every so often, as well as some video clips (though because of how much it’s zoomed in the video is distractingly shaky).
Soon, two more lynx emerged and my hands were shaking for a different reason – because I was so thrilled to see them.
I was particularly excited to see these lynx because of an absolutely epic encounter I’d had with one not too far way from this spot, that I hadn’t been able to capture on film. I’d been cross-country skiing on the trail through Beaver Glen campground, just up the road, and as I came up on the campground kiosk, a snowshoe hare ran in front of me and hit a “do not enter” sign attached to an open vehicle gate. It fell over. I was horrified. I felt I’d distracted this hare as it had been running and it had been inadvertently been stunned or killed as a result. But I had only a few seconds to take in what had happened when a lynx burst up from the direction the hare had come from. It lunged for the hare, placing one paw on it, and then stared me right in the eye for what felt like several seconds, and then it dragged the hare backwards into the woods. The whole encounter lasted about 30 seconds. I’d actually had ample time to take out my phone. I thought I’d gotten a video clip of it. Alas, my fingers had been too cold and I hadn’t actually pressed the “record” button like I thought. I regret it to this day.
So seeing three whole lynx, and being able to observe them for five minutes or more, even from a distance? Absolutely thrilling. They eventually jogged up onto the snowdrift on the side of the road, stared at me, and eventually retreated back the way they came. I called my sister back and I’d taken so long she thought I’d gotten et, in her words. I had to reassure her that lynx were quite small – I’d only be worried about getting eaten if I was a snowshoe hare.
The landscape of Prince Albert National Park isn’t what many people expect when they picture Saskatchewan. The Trans-Canada highway runs through the flat prairies of the province – most people think of Saskatchewan as “that flat, boring place you drive through to get to more interesting places”. But if you’re willing to drive a bit further north, you can enter the boreal forest. In fact, the provincial flag of Saskatchewan is separated into two, equal colours for this very reason. Yellow for the grasslands to the south, and green for the boreal forests to the north. Both make up this territory, but trees aren’t what most people picture when they think of this place.
I’m lucky enough at this time in my life to be a resident of the town site of Waskesiu Lake, in Prince Albert National Park, Saskatchewan. This morning was new year’s day, and me and a new friend (a Quebecoise bird nerd now resident of Regina) went for a short hike in the snow, to start off 2023 on the right foot.
Here are some of the things that we saw!
We hiked Mud Creek Trail, which is about 10 minutes by car from the town site of Waskesiu. We parked just off the Narrows Road, on the south side of the lake, as the little road to the usual summer parking lot is closed during the winter as it’s difficult to plough – so it adds about 10 minutes each way to the walk, in these snow conditions. Early on, we saw a little trail. My first instinct was to think “otter slide” because I’ve seen them in the area before… but those are usually several hops, and then a short slide of a few metres, before the individual gets up again. In this case, it was a steady half-tunnel, with waddling footsteps. When I saw the pacing of the tracks, then looked closely and saw drag marks, my thinking now is that this was a porcupine.
Next, we saw fox tracks, walking along. Several times, we saw a gap in the tracks, and then a scuffle a foot or so away. Our thinking is that it was pouncing on a rodent underneath the snow.
Right near the trail head (we saw all of this before we even got on the trail itself!) I spotted a line of tracks. I was puzzling over them and was just saying I thought they were the tracks of a ruffed grouse (bird tracks, ruffed grouse known to be in the area) and my friend said “Gélinotte?” (French for “grouse”) and I was just saying like “yeah, I think it’s a gélinotte huppée” (ruffed grouse) and she’s like, no it’s for sure a Gélinotte huppée because it’s right there. And then she pointed behind me and sure enough, there was the bird who had just made the tracks. I was gratified my identification had been correct! I somehow didn’t take a photo of the actual trackway, but essentially I think of them as walking like a model on a catwalk, one foot in front of the other in a line. Even if the three toes are obscured that’s usually the vibe I get from the tracks.
Next, I spotted… what looked to be a bird that had planted itself on the ground and then taken off again. There was just a whole, surrounded by two wing imprints. I’m not sure if this was a (tiny?) bird of prey landing some rodent, or if it was a grouse that had been startled, landed, and took off again. My mitten for scale. It could be grouse sized… the only birds of prey that are around this time of year would be like a small owl species perhaps?
We also saw and heard some red breasted nuthatches. Can you spot the little feathered friend in this image?
We also saw several small scats from carnivores. If poop can be cute, is this poop cute? I believe they’re from animals in the weasel family but I’m happy to hear other suggestions!
We were out walking for perhaps an hour and a half at most and saw so much animal sign! One of the things I love the most about spending time outside in the snow in the wintertime is the increased awareness of other animals. I can go an entire spring, summer, and fall without seeing a snowshoe hare more than once, but in the wintertime, I can’t escape signs of their presence – their tracks and scat are everywhere, like afterimages.
Happy new year to all – I hope that you can spend time out in nature, whereever you are!
Walking through the golf course in Waskesiu in Prince Albert National Park, I heard the drumming of a Ruffed Grouse. I cast my eyes about, and though he was ably camouflaged in the dull brown landscape of early spring, I spotted him posing on a log, doing his “I’m such a sexy grouse” thing, presumably for any other grouse ladies in the area. I approached slowly, quietly, but casually, and he took notice of me. I watched him for a good 15 minutes through binoculars and he looked me right in the eye and did his drumming routine.
Have I been propositioned by this handsome fellow?
Photos taken with my regular ole Samsung smartphone and a pair of secondhand binoculars, from a distance of about three car lengths away.
Canada Goose, taken through a pair of Nikon 10X42 binoculars with a Samsung Galaxy S7 smartphone.
When I go birding, I log my sightings on eBird and scribble them down in a very worn birding journal. I do my best to identify what I can in the field. If all I can hear is the bird, I often use the voice memo function on my phone to record it and then compare with my bird song CD or Sibley’s app later on so I can avoid stressing out birds in person. However, a picture is worth a thousand words, as they say, and it’s not always possible to identify birds by sight in field conditions. The bird identification guides I have at home and work are great, though I’d prefer not to haul them around on hikes. (The Merlin and Sibley apps can be super handy in that respect, provided my phone doesn’t die while I’m out and about.) However, memory can play tricks on you and having a decent photograph of the bird can really help identify a bird visually later on.
That being said, I am still mentally in the “poor starving student” mode and at this point in my life I can’t really afford a super nice camera with a zoom lens. (You know the ones – they look like huge canons and make me super jealous.) I imagine that they must be tricky to cart around at times as well as you’re traipsing over uneven terrain! That’s why one of the single most useful skills I’ve been practicing while birdwatching has been digiscoping: pairing my cell phone camera with my binoculars or a spotting scope to capture images of birds as an aide-memoire. I mean, I’m going to have my phone and binoculars on my person anyway – why have a separate, expensive piece of technology?
It’s a relatively simple technique that can get quite good results for my purposes, but you need a steady hand and it does take practice. (You can, apparently, buy clamps for phones but again, see “poor starving student” mindset above.) Even after taking hundreds of digiscopes, I still get loads of photos with a shadow from the binoculars in them from not having my phone in the exact perfect position. Here is a short video demonstrating what I mean by shadows:
The beauty of digital photography, however, is that you can take as many photographs as you like and not be wasting film! For every really solid photograph of a bird I take this way, I get about half a dozen that are flawed in some way.
Here is a small collection of some of my favourite more recent images I’ve taken with this technique. As you can see, particularly by the image of the oriole, it can be difficult to get the birds into focus at times, especially if they are a relatively small part of the image. Regardless, I’ve found digiscoping a valuable tool to keep track of what birds I’ve spotted:
Male Red-Winged Blackbird, showing off.
Butt of a female Red-Winged Blackbird (probably).
An American Bittern!
Red-breasted Merganser, trying to impress some ladies.
A Mountain Bluebird perches on a post in Fort Saskatchewan.
The elusive Sora… I’ve been hearing them for years and never got a chance to catch a photo until last week at Elk Island National Park, Alberta.
A Double-Crested Cormorant taking off at Astotin Lake, Elk Island National Park.
A Ruddy Duck!
Baltimore Oriole on one of Elk Island’s fences.
Probably a Lesser Yellowlegs? Definitely a sandpiper with super yellow legs, let me tell you.
I tend to keep my binoculars in my purse or backpack as I go about my work day or whenever I walk outside, and as a millennial I of course always have my smartphone handy. That makes it super easy to snap a few shots of even distant birds to examine more in depth later on – and to tweet as proof of my sightings. I don’t always set out intending to go birdwatching – and that’s when you stumble across an interesting bird. I always like to be prepared, and having this technique down pat means you can still get amazing photographs relatively quickly without having to kick yourself for not hauling around a giant and expensive camera at all times.
When I first started getting into birdwatching, it was a little overwhelming. Even just focussing on local birds, there were huge numbers to learn to identify. I got hung up on memorizing patterns of plumage. The colour of a bird’s feathers can be very important in positively identifying a species, but I was getting discouraged when I could only catch a short or partial glimpse of a bird, or when the bird was backlit, making the colours difficult to discern. I was focussing too much on the details, and less on the overall picture.
Little brown birds, seen from behind and partially blocked by plants: the bane of my existence.
Then I read the introduction to a book called Better Birding, in which authors George Armistead and Brian Sullivan talked about GISS: General Impressions, Shape and Size. They explained that identifying birds was not necessarily about spotting one particular tell-tale clue, but overall impressions. The author used the analogy of being able to spot your best friend in a crowded room from behind. How do you know it was her? Well, it’s her favourite café, in her favourite booth, with her favourite drink in front of her, but even if there was someone else sitting there with the same beverage wearing a similar coat to one of hers, you’d still know that it wasn’t her. It was also in how she holds herself, what her voice sounds like, and so on. It’s to do with behaviour as well as looks.
I found this idea to be extremely helpful. This is how I can know a Canada Goose at a glance, even in flight and silhouetted against the sun. I’m not necessarily looking for anything specific about them. They just look, sound, and act like Canada Geese. The trick is then to get in enough observation time to build up a vocabulary of bird behaviour for more species than the handful I grew up knowing.
Once you start to know the GISS of a species, the identification of a drab female can get a lot easier. The female Red Winged Blackbird is a small-ish brown-ish bird, but has the exact same GISS as the male, just a different colour.
If she acts like a blackbird and hangs out with blackbirds and looks like a blackbird in every way except, well, being black… She’s probably a female Red Winged Blackbird.
But even really knowing only a limited number of birds really well right now, GISS is still useful for identifying species that are new to me. In May, I was walking in the Lois Hole Provincial Park in St. Albert, Alberta, with my mother and a pair of binoculars. I am very familiar with Red Winged Blackbirds: what they sound like, how they fly and how they move about the cattails. Then a bird that caught my eye. It wouldn’t have last year, when I had spent less time observing Red Winged Blackbirds closely. In that lighting (it was a cloudy day), it seemed dark in colour, and held itself like a blackbird… but something about it seemed off to me. I looked at it more closely through my binoculars, and found that the shape of its tail looked odd, not like what I would expect from a Red Winged Blackbird. Though it was dark in colour, it didn’t have the expected red epaulettes, and definitely didn’t look like a female of the species.
This is the bird I saw. Let’s enhance!
However, with a few small differences, the overall GISS led me to think that this bird may in the blackbird family. So pulled up my handy-dandy Sibley bird book app and went to the section with the Red Winged Blackbirds to look at its relations… and there I had my answer: a Common Grackle. It was a little bit bigger than a Red Winged Blackbird, its tail was a different shape, and looking at some photos I took of it later, I could more clearly see the different beak length and of course the plumage differences that were not as obvious to me in the field. (They are ever so slightly iridescent and have blue heads!)
Half an hour later, I spotted another grackle in better lighting and was able to admire its pretty blue plumage!
I never would have looked more closely at this bird if I hadn’t known Red Winged Blackbirds so well. Grackles were just similar enough to make the differences jump out at me. It was the similarities in the general impressions, shape and size of this bird that helped me narrow it down to a definitive identification.
Further Resources
Armistead, George L. and Brian L. Sullivan. Better Birding: Tips, Tools & Concepts for the Field. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2016.
You spot a bird in the distance – dark head, light body. A Common Scaup? Ring-necked Duck? Canvasback? A quick glimpse through your binoculars tells you that it’s a Mallard. You immediately lower your binos in disappointment and cast your gaze elsewhere to look for more interesting birds.
This reaction isn’t uncommon. However, I have learned that spending some time watching birds you already know and getting to know them really well has huge advantages! Here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t dismiss common birds so quickly:
1) Use them for a sense of scale. If you know precisely how big a Red-winged Blackbird, an American Robin, a Mallard, or a Canada Goose is, you can use them to reliably give nearby birds a sense of scale, even when the birds are at a distance. Seeing a pair of mallards sitting next to a tiny duck helped me ID a Cinnamon Teal for the first time.
Two incredibly useful Mallards next to a Cinnamon Teal. How much smaller the Cinnamon Teal was compared to the Mallards was the first thing I noticed about it, and helped me narrow down this ID from “duck? Maybe a drab female something??” to “Cinnamon Teal.” Photographed on April 2, 2017 at the Lois Hole Provincial Park, St. Albert, Alberta, Canada.
2) Use them to rule out or rule in bird families. If you know it sounds like a Black-capped Chickadee but it sounds off… Maybe it’s a different kind of chickadee, like a Boreal Chickadee. Become familiar with your local soundscape. Common birds may give you the first clue to identifying their cousins!
Red-winged Blackbirds are really beautiful and have distinctive voices, but elements of their sound quality appear in the songs of their relatives like the Yellow-Headed Blackbird. Photo by Lauren Markewicz.
3) Common is relative. Recently, a bunch of birders chartered planes to a remote island in Scotland to see a drab female Red-winged Blackbird that had somehow made it across the Atlantic ocean. I’ve seen 50 Red Winged Blackbirds in 10 minutes in Western Canada, but I understand the appeal and if a common bird unique to the UK somehow made it to Alberta I may feel the same impulse. I get excited when I see stands-headed Blackbirds in the Edmonton area, though people closer to Calgary and southern Alberta probably see them far more often.
Look at this Mallard! So pretty, with its shiny green head! Have you ever noticed that they have tiny curly black tail feathers? Super adorable! Photo taken at the Lois Hole Provincial Park, St. Albert, Alberta,
4) Some of them are really pretty! Have you ever looked at the iridescent green feathers on a Mallard’s head on a sunny day? Or looked at the oil-slick iridescence of a pigeon? They are absolutely gorgeous. If they weren’t so common, I think that Mallards would be much more admired for their beauty.
Too Many Sparrows 