Tag Archives: YouTube

River Otter Snacking (Video)

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I finally got around to putting together the following river otter video from a short video clip that I captured last spring:

What reminded me of the video clip was a wonderful sequence of river otter pictures recently posted by a fellow member of the Fraser Valley Birding forum who is also a great photographer.

I also created the following YouTube version of the River Otter video.

The footage for the video was taken in Town Centre Park in Coquitlam, BC.  We’re not sure how the otter got into “Lafarge Lake” (the name for the glorified pond on the site of an old quarry) however we do have a pretty good idea why he liked it there. Except during the hottest months of the year, the pond is stocked with fish for anyone to come and try to catch. For the otter, it’s a free buffet in addition to all of the yummy things that occur naturally in the pond such as the crunchy morsel with claws that it is eating in the video.

Lake Lafarge River Otter-1000837

River Otter in Lafarge Lake, Town-Centre Park, Coquitlam, April 2013. Copyright 2013, Kevin H Hood, all rights reserved.

The camera was hand-held during the recording and Adobe Premiere Elements Video Editor (version 11) was used to touch up the original footage and to publish it to YouTube.  The original sound-track was filtered to reduce background noise but was otherwise left untouched and consists of background (city) noise, a crow calling and, if you listen carefully, something that might be the sound of the otter crunching on its snack.

Lake Lafarge River Otter-1000838

River Otter in Lafarge Lake, Town-Centre Park, Coquitlam, April 2013. Copyright 2013, Kevin H Hood, all rights reserved.

Five Harlequin Ducks Video

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My second outing with the Ken ‘s Birding Photography class took place August 31, 2013 and started in the same place as the first, at the Reifel Migratory Bird Sanctuary.  This time it ended at the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal along the South side of the spit.  One of our last sightings was a small group of 5 Harlequin Ducks that were slowly working their way down the length of the spit.

Besides lots of pictures, I took a minute long video with my camera that was sufficiently entertaining that I dressed it up using Microsoft Movie Maker, added some music (to replace the sounds of automobile traffic and birder chit-chat) and made it available for general consumption in the video window below and on both Flickr and YouTube (my first ever YouTube video).

So, without further ado, here are ‘5 Harlequin Ducks’:

Here are the other links:

5 Harlequin Ducks (Flickr: small 484 x 272)
5 Harlequin Ducks (Flickr: medium 854 x 480)

5 Harlequin Ducks (Youtube)

The streaming from Flickr and/or Youtube may not be very smooth so downloading a copy from the ‘Share’ menu or from one of the versions on Flickr and watching locally should lead to a noticeably better experience.

Enjoy!

Birding Song Parodies by Young Birders

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A couple of mornings ago, I came across the following ABA blog post by ABA president Jeff Gordon: Ladies and Gentlemen, LIVE from Camp Avocet…Pish & Twitch!!!. For anyone who likes birding and musical parodies it’s worth a listen (I missed breakfast and was almost late for a dentist appointment trying to make it through the YouTube links).

In a nutshell: Camp Avocet is an ABA run summer camp for young birders and Pish & Twitch is a musical duo newly formed by two of the campers Caleb and Brendan. Following a long tradition in song parody, they took well-known tunes and replaced the lyrics to poke fun at, in this case, birding and birders. Five songs were recorded and can be found on YouTube, through the links in Jeff’s article.

The first three songs (in posted order) used contemporary tunes the only one of which I recognized was their second song “Moves Like Jaeger” which was obviously a parody of the Maroon 5 and Christina Aguilera hit “Moves Like Jagger”. The other two tunes were lifers for me once I made identifications with the help of my phone’s SoundHound app.  The first song “Chase Me Maybe” about going after rare bird sightings, covered “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Japsen and the third tune, about night-time bird call identification, “Flight Calls”, used the melody (if you can call it that) from “Thrift Shop” by “Party DJ Rockerz”.

The final two songs were based on well known hits from my own youth. The first of these was “Migrants Go By” sung to the Don Mclean hit “American Pie”. Impressively, they covered the 8-plus-minute long version and not one of the shorter radio-friendly variants. And finally, the song, “Bill Stewart”, clearly aimed at all of the camp leaders, was sung to the Billy Joel hit “Piano Man”.

It wasn’t what you might call a ‘tight’ performance as they had obviously bitten off more than they had time to practice for but that did not seem to detract from the energy in the room.  Besides, the hard part of a parody is crafting the lyrics and there they did some excellent work.

If you are a part or or even just familiar with birding culture then you will probably enjoy listening to Pish and Twitch.