Orioles

  When we moved here to Tucson a couple of years ago I began photographing the wonderful wildlife around us, the bobcats and wolf-sized coyotes, the javelinas, the mule deer, the Gila Monsters, the Western Diamond-backed Rattlesnakes, the tarantulas, the scorpions. It's how I got in touch with them, how I learned to really see them.

Birds are a special case. They come in discrete containers, and so can receive priority attention depending on their charisma. So it was no surprise I began with hummingbirds. First of all, there was their amazing flying, and their brilliant colors they suddenly flashed just by turning to look at you, and their tameness so you can photograph from just inches away. In the past I had lived in places that only had one or two species; suddenly I had half-dozen species to sort out by age or sex, and that was my first bit of business.

And of course I spent great time on the raptors, who lived their savage lives in front of us, plucking their prey with snow-storms of white body feathers.

This year suddenly we had orioles. Cheryl began putting out little tubs of grape jelly, and the sweetness is bringing bring them  up close to the house and my camera.  I knew they were colorful birds but I hadn't realized just how photogenic they were. Like the hummingbirds, and the raptors, they vary with age and gender.

Here is the female Hooded Oriole. It is the plainest form, darkish on the back and wings and tail, yellow below. It is the commonest species here in Tucson. The name is because the male appears to be wearing a yellow hood over its neck (other oriole species are dark on the head and neck).

Here is the immature male. It differs by having a black chin and black breast.

And finally, here is the adult male, going to a beautiful orange and black.

 And as a bonus, if we hadn't been observing the hooded orioles so carefully, I would have missed out on another species, looking exactly like the hooded, except it didn't have a hood, but a black head and back, and this one was a Bullocks Oriole, a species I had never seen before.