Three Things Thursday

Thanks to Nerd in the Brain for the weekly challenge Three Things Thursday:

three things that make me smile: an exercise in gratitude – feel free to steal this idea with wild abandon and fill your blog with the happy

We have a couple of trips scheduled for the next two years, for which we recently bought a new camera with a gigantic zoom lens. My husband has been walking around practicing zoomed-in photography. Eventually I will claim the camera for my own practice shots, but in the meantime I’m grateful that he has allowed me to use these three bird pictures.

(Click on any photo to see a larger version.)

(1) Singing Bird

I haven’t yet tried to look this guy up in my bird book. My husband says he was singing his heart out.

(2) Hornbill

Hubby photographed this exotic bird on a visit to Point Defiance Zoo & Aquarium.

Here’s some more information:

Meet Pilai the Hornbill! She is 20 years old and weighs a little over 3 pounds. She lives at the Asian Forest Sanctuary exhibit. Her favorite snacks are grapes and bananas. She also loves blueberries but they have to be the perfect amount of ripeness for her to eat them. Pilai plays with small toys but her favorite is a rock that she uses to toss around and clean out her beak with. Hornbills in the wild also use rocks and bark to clean their beaks.

(3) Flickers (I think)

I was pretty sure these were a female (left) and male (right) flicker:

However, when I checked my bird book, the sketch didn’t look exactly like this. The book has the red on the front of the face, not on the back of the head as it appears to be on the bird on the right. But the book says flickers are common on the ground, where they move around eating ants, and that description fits what the birds in this photo appear to be doing.

Flickers are large birds in the woodpecker family and are common around here, so I’m sticking with my original identification unless someone can identify these as something else. Please let me know in the comments if these aren’t flickers and you know what they are.

Have a good week, everybody!

© 2016 by Mary Daniels Brown