Ah, one of my favorite birds of the Netherlands is the Pied Avocet. We saw a few in mid-August during a visit to the Oostvaardersplassen.

Bird Photography Weekly is a regular collection of user-submitted bird photos from all over the world. The new edition comes out every Sunday. Go have a look at this week’s submissions!

On August 15th Arthur and I visited one of our favorite birding spots, Vogelplas Starrevaart. We spent some time watching birds from the blind. This Great Crested Grebe having a nap on the water was one of the birds we saw.

Bird Photography Weekly is a regular collection of user-submitted bird photos from all over the world. The new edition comes out every Sunday. Go have a look at this week’s submissions!

White-tailed Eagle pride in Lelystad

Get Wordless!

One of the best place to watch birds in the Netherlands is the Oostvaardersplassen. Arthur and I spent some time there this weekend – our first visit in about two years. This juvenile Tufted Duck caught my attention – s/he was busy hunting and feeding for at least a half hour.

Bird Photography Weekly is a regular collection of user-submitted bird photos from all over the world. The new edition comes out every Sunday. Go have a look at this week’s submissions!

Last week there were a few stories of note regarding birds in the Netherlands.

In Friesland, 2010 was a great year for meadow- and field-breeding birds like the Northern Lapwing and Black-tailed Godwit. The number of breeding pairs doubled in some habitats, with huge numbers of young birds successfully fledged. The reason for this year’s huge breeding success may have been delayed mating after an unusually cold spring. (source)

Northern Lapwing, Zwaanenwater, April 2006

Another species, this time on one of the Wadden Islands, also had a record breeding season. Eurasian Spoonbills on the island of Texel had more offspring than ever previously recorded. 540 breeding pairs broke the previous record of 397 in 2009. 2010 was the third record-breaking season in a row, so the spoonbills continue to thrive on Texel. (source)

Eurasian Spoonbill, Texel, April 2007

On a less positive note, the number of captive birds of prey in the Netherlands is growing at an alarming rate. The number of permits given has increased ten-fold (anyone in the Netherlands may keep a bird of prey, so long as the bird was born in captivity). Along with this, the number of lost or escaped captive birds is a growing problem. So far in 2010, seventeen captive Eurasian Eagle-owls have escaped (that’s about the same number of wild eagle-owls currently living in the Netherlands!). The Dutch branch of BirdLife International is working towards restricting the number of captive birds being kept in the Netherlands. (source)

I’ve got orange on my mind today. Hup Holland Hup!!

Baltimore Oriole by Harrier, on Flickr

Hang on… These aren’t my feet! by EltonHarding, on Flickr

Orange Bird by coondawg_97 (AKA CrookedNose), on Flickr

The Stare by Jundy Tiu***busy as a bee here in PNG!!!***, on Flickr

Orange Bird by Adri L, on Flickr

Euplectes franciscanus by Oliveira Pires, on Flickr

Robin Redbreast by Vox Sciurorum, on Flickr

Toucan bird by doug88888, on Flickr

Guarda Rios // Kingfisher by jvverde, on Flickr

TOGETHER WE HUNT by LEICALENS PICS., on Flickr

Look Into My Eyes !!! by Jeffdalt, on Flickr

The Dutch branch of BirdLife International, Vogelbescherming Nederland, has an extremely popular nestcam website each spring at Beleef de Lente. As cameras are nearly shut down for the season, fans have voted for their favorite highlight clip from the eight nestcams. The Clip of the Year is called “Huiselijk Geweld” – Domestic Violence. It shows a Little Owl family dealing with an intruder – a Stock Pigeon with a nest of her own in the same box as the owls!

Unfortunately the highlight clips are not embeddable this year, but if you click on the image below you will be taken a page showing all of the best clips.

The favorite highlights from all of the nestcams are shown below the Little Owl clip. Check out the seven impossibly tiny Great Titlings in “Koolmees: Zeven snaveltjes” and two White Storks sleeping through being banded in the nest in “Ooievaar: Ringen Gorssel 2010.”

The following video profiles two companies that are marketing raptor robots. The machines are being marketed to airports as bird deterrents.

The Spanish company Bird Raptor Internacional has produced a model airplane painted to look like a Peregrine Falcon. In the clip, the “falcon” flies by a flock of gulls, who quickly disperse. I wonder if the falcon paint job had anything to do with it, though. Would they disperse if a regular model airplane flew closely over them?

A Dutch company has developed another robotic bird, but the GreenX model Bald Eagle actually flaps its wings! Developers of this model see it being used in nature films or as a spy plane. I think they should market to model airplane enthusiasts – I mean, what a cool toy!

Read more about the robo-raptors here.

My favorite nest cams over at the Dutch site Beleef de Lente start streaming today. For the season it looks like they’ll have cameras on Common Kestrel (Torenvalk), Little Owl (Steenuil), Great Tit (Koolmees), White Stork (Ooievaar), Barn Swallow (Boerenzwaluw), Eurasian Nuthatch (Boomklever), Eurasian Eagle-owl (Oehoe) (!!), and Barn Owl (Kerkuil). Those last two are new for this year and I’m really looking forward to peeking in on the Eagle-owl in the coming weeks.

Eurasian Eagle-owl from Picture Taker 2’s photostream on Flickr

Usually at least a few of the nests have multiple live cameras going, and highlight videos are archived for later viewing (Iets gemist?). Nest milestones like the date of each egg and hatching are noted too (Hoogtepunten).

Even if you don’t read Dutch, the streaming cams are fun to watch and the archived clips are usually neat.

Are you looking forward to watching a nest cam this season? Do you have a favorite live streaming nest cam website? Please let me know in the comments!

When Arthur and I first started becoming interested in birds back in Holland, Arthur’s father told us about a site he’d seen called vogelkijkhut.nl, which I kind of like to think was our spark thing (no spark bird). Vogelkijkhut means bird-look-hut or bird hide, and the website is a totally awesome directory of the all the bird hides in the Netherlands. The site is also integrated with waarneming.nl, similar to North America’s eBird. There is basic information for each entry, including type of site (blind or hide, screen, tower, etc), whether there is parking and if it is accessible via public transportation. Further details are provided per site, including user-submitted photos, detailed driving or public transport directions, habitat, and recent bird and wildlife sightings via the waarneming.nl link. The site is naturally in Dutch, but if you look at the page on our favorite local birding spot, Starrevaart, you can get a good idea of the wealth of information on the site. There are 376 locations listed in total.

The entrance to the hide at Starrevaart. Note how the path to the door is also blinded from wildlife.

We would base weekend outings on bird hides we found on this website. Since vogelkijkhut.nl is linked to waarneming.nl, we could look on the site at the hides close to our home or intended day-trip location and see what birds were recently seen from that hide.

Our interest in birding grew as we easily found new birding sites within our reach, with loads of data about each site available at our fingertips. Birding from hides meant that we could sit and enjoy great views of birds that would go about their business – without noticing all the bird groupies that were watching their every move.

Bird hide with low windows at Doñana National Park in Spain

As our interest continued to grow, we would bird farther and farther afield, and during the years we lived in Rotterdam and Leiden we were able to take several trips within Europe where we usually tried to fit in some birding. A lot of this birding was also done from hides.

Exiting a bird hide in the Loire Valley, France

When we moved back to Illinois in late 2008, we looked forward to American birding, presumably some of which would be from some good American bird hides (I guess we call them bird blinds, here?) – boy were we wrong!

Why aren’t there bird blinds here? Why are the majority of bird observation areas we come across locally open decks? Why are there so many hides in the Netherlands and Europe? This question has been on my mind a lot lately, and I can’t really come up with one good answer.

Of course, I’ve only got experience birding around our local counties (Lake, McHenry and Cook) and a very little bit of birding in Florida and Ohio (just a few day’s worth), so it could be that there are more wildlife observation blinds in other parts of the country. It’s just the near complete lack of them in our own birding excursions is so disappointing. I mean, birding by butt is so comfy, am I right?

Open “blind” at Merritt Island NWR in Florida

I started a Flickr pool for bird hide images a little while ago. Unsurprisingly, most of the photos are from hides in Great Britain, the Netherlands, and other parts of Europe. (If you’ve got photos of bird blinds or other wildlife observation constructions, I would love for you to add them to the pool.)

If birding is such a popular hobby here in the United States, why aren’t there more comfortable hides from which birds and other wildlife can be observed?

America has a lot more conserved land than Europe, so one reason may be that wildlife viewing opportunities are more restricted across the pond, and providing a blind from which to view animals 1) makes the chance of seeing some wildlife more likely and 2) is less likely to disturb the birds and animals that are living in the restricted natural area. In the Netherlands there seems to be a bird hide at every natural park or wildlife area we came across, while here in Lake County I only know of one true blind, a small building on the Tamarack Trail at Volo Bog (also the smallest hide I’ve ever seen).

Observation blind at Volo Bog

There are, however, several sites in the county where bird or wildlife observation areas are set aside. At Rollins Savanna there is an open viewing area with a couple of scopes. A platform was recently built at Prairie Wolf Slough for viewing the wetland.

Viewing platform at Prairie Wolf Slough

Could weather be a factor? It rains a lot in the Netherlands, much more than here in northern Illinois. Are there a lot of covered bird blinds in the Pacific Northwest of the United States?

Are there a lot of bird or wildlife observation blinds at your favorite local birding patches? Do you have any ideas as to why we seem to lack blinds here while Europe uses them extensively? I would really love to hear your theories!