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Comment by japhyr | Hacker News Reader

What's everyone's favorite bird sighting?

I'm from southeast Alaska. We have a lot of interesting birds, but they tend to be fairly drab at this latitude. My favorite sighting happened on an early morning run in southwest Colorado. I was running down a mountain road at sunrise, and a western tanager was singing loudly from the very top of a tall pine. It was the most brilliant, beautiful bird I'd ever seen.

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I've been into raptors for 25+ years, and at age 54 saw my first California condor. We were driving back from the North Rim and I saw this massive bird, then caught sight of the white underwing. Pulled the car over, into a couple small shrubs (I was excited, ok) and grabbed my camera. I didn't have my good binos (vintage Leica) but the camera had decent zoom. It was blasting wind and the condor was riding it like a roller coaster, sometimes straight over me, then seconds later a half mile north, then back, high, low. In the zoo, they just sit; here, it was in its element and full of life.

A few years ago I visited Sydney's Royal Botanic Garden, walked around for a bit, then sat and read on a bench (Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk) for a couple of hours as the sun set. I happened to read a particularly affecting section where a main character's death is narrated from a strange limited omniscient perspective. And then a rainbow lorikeet [1] alit on the far end of my bench and aimlessly walked around for a minute or so before flying away again.

Not exactly a rare bird for the area, but the confluence of events was memorable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_lorikeet

Maybe a toucan near Iguazu Falls. I’d always kind of assumed they were some silly Froot Loops cartoon birds. But watching one fly through the forest, it was incredibly graceful and majestic.

I was camping in Badlands National Park when a thunderstorm rolled through and lightning struck about a thousand feet away. The next day I went exploring to try to find where it hit. After crossing a stream and hiking up a small butte, I watched what looked like a golden eagle soaring on the wind looking for prairie dogs. The coolest part was that because I was up on a butte the eagle was beneath me and I could see it from above.

My most exciting bird sighting was a Golden Cheeked Warbler. I actually got pictures of him and I was in a very lucky spot to do so.

Ospreys in the Grand Canyon of Yellowstone. It looked like a mother/father osprey teaching their young to fly. It was stunning.

I snapped some photos of a pair of bald eagles sunning their wings on a lake in Wisconsin last summer. Absolutely stunning.

male painted bunting, in east texas!

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