Birds

One of the best scores I made at the used books stores was a hardly used copy of this book:

It is a very professional book for serious birders more than I need. From the introduction we have:

1. There are 15 speicies and 69 supspeceies that live year round in Taiwan.
2. Because Taiwan is in the flight path of many migrating birds, there are 520 different bird seen in Taiwan.
3. That is 1/20th of the 9700 known birds in the world

That's pretty good for such a small island. But birding is popular in Taiwan, with lots of expensive equipment in use. Every once in awhile you see big knots of people looking up into a tree with their expensive cameras and binoculars.

If I get a good shot of a bird, there's a good chance that I can identify it, like these

spotted neck dove

light vented bulbul

Malay Night Heron

Getting a good picture is tough, I now have new respect for those with all the equipment to get a good shot of something so small, so shy, so quick to move, ...

I remember once we went to Yeliu and while walking on a path we were struck my the bird calls. There was a bird photographer there with all of his equipment. After a while I realized that he was using his cell phone to play recorded bird calls to get the bird near.

This is the only bird I recognized from US is the aerial rat

the pigeon.