Somebody must have told the Eastern Kingbirds of Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge yesterday that I was coming and it was “okay” to ham it up for me and my camera. There were three of them in all as I made my way around the 7.5 mile Prairie’s Edge Wildlife Drive at this refuge about 60 miles northwest of the Twin Cities. The area the drive takes the visitor through is a combination of prairie grasslands (dotted with clumps of wildflowers), oak savannahs (for my Florida friends, not unlike the “cypress domes” of the Everglades), lakes and ponds, and deciduous woodlands.

My limited experience with Eastern Kingbirds in Florida was that they were particularly skittish but these guys weren't that way at all. The bird in these two images flew to three different perches while hawking insects and let me drive up and stop for more photos each time. Birds, for whatever reason, can be that way though - some will pose and some will take off if you just think about trying to get close.

I wish I had a couple of more days to hang around the area and work on some of the little birds but, in a stroke of poor planning for the holiday weekend, I’m forced to move north today to the Bemidji area in the north central part of the state. Not that this is necessarily all that bad because most – if not all – of the same bird species will be present further north. I’ll be visiting sites on the Upper Mississippi Birding Trail. One of those I didn't get here but will encounter in much greater numbers as I move west are Yellow-headed Blackbirds. I saw about five yesterday and, though I'd seen them at Bosque and in California, they were not as close as they were here so I didn't really know how striking they are. Another I look forward to shooting is the Northern Oriole - what a beauty!

I know I lot of people label me as a "bird photographer" but I like to think I'm just a specialist in that area and consider myself a "nature" or "natural history photographer". I really do like to shoot it all including wildflowers and dragonflies. And here I got both - the flowers are Columbine and someday when I have a little more time I'll research the Odonata species of Minnesota so I can properly catalog this guy. Tell you what, when late afternoon comes around you can almost cut the dragonflies with a knife around the shaded woodland areas at Sherburne.

Strange Behavior Department: I get my chances to see unusual and/or interesting behaviors while I'm out there like the Wood Stork incident I wrote about a little over a week ago. Now I tend to think of Sandhill Cranes as rather laid back and somewhat docile creatures. Having said that I've also seen what lash out with its bill rather violently at a Black Vulture that got a little too close to a chick. Yesterday as I was about 2/3's of the way around the drive I saw a pair making their way through the marsh being followed by a youngster. Though they were too far away to shoot I stopped to watch just because I like cranes. As they started moving into the tall stuff I realized they were getting mobbed by a couple of Red-winged Blackbirds who I can only guess may have had a nest nearby. Heavily cropped to try and show a little bit of what was taking place (700 focal length just wasn't enough) the male blackbird has just swooped by the cranes head while the other (who had just landed after taking a turn) is perched and yapping away just below and to the right of the crane's head (as always, click on the images to view them larger and in a new window). I've seen a lot of mobbing behavior - various little birds chasing crows or hawks, Blue Jays after Bald Eagles, Mockingbirds after Great-horned Owls - but just don't think of Sandhill Cranes as the kind of bird that the smaller ones would be bothered by. Gotta love those birds - you just never know what they'll do next.