Warm spring weather has lured the American Toads into their breeding ponds and pools. Males grab at anything that moves and often clump together in a mass around single females. Amplexus pairs sink to the bottom, and females begin laying their long strings of eggs. What an amazing spring mating ritual!
This morning I went out with one goal in mind: to get video footage of a singing Gray Catbird, silhouetted against the dawn sky. Was I successful? Judge for yourself …
Of all backyard bird sounds, perhaps the least musical is the song of the Common Grackle. Check out this funny video of males giving their raspy squeaks as they lean forward and puff out their feathers …
Enjoy this brief video of a snoring Pickerel Frog, that I made way back in 2009 when I first started dabbling in nature videography. Not bad, considering …
In this engaging video, I’ve brought together my favorite clips of Bloodroot and ordered them to help convey the luminous quality of the flowers, informed by the depth of my personal experience of being there, immersed in the bloom and in search of creative expression …
Today I got my best underwater video footage of spawning male White Suckers, gathered at the base of a waterfall at the edge of town, excitedly awaiting the arrival of receptive females.
The Ruby-crowned Kinglet … a tiny avian jewel with a scarlet patch on its crown … is one of my favorite birds, primarily because of it’s sprightly cheerful song — a series of very high notes followed by a rambling jumble and ending with a silly-sounding chant …
Tonight I used my hydrophones to record underwater sounds of Spring Peepers in our backyard pond. To my complete surprise and disbelief, there was quite a bit more going on than just the peeping of the peepers. which is all I could hear above water. There were loud snoring sounds, and a variety of chucking and stuttering calls. Oh my gosh … these are the calls of Pickerel Frogs! How could this be? None of these sounds were audible to me if I took off the headphones and listened to only the airborne sounds.
This morning, at the break of dawn, I recorded the croaks and yelps of a family of Common Ravens, nesting in a dense spruce stand at the edge of my yard …
It’s mid-April and the woodpeckers are drumming like crazy. This morning, I headed to a nearby natural area at dawn and soon captured a nice video of a Downy Woodpecker, drumming from near the top of a dead snag …