To birders, “looking through the glass” refers to binoculars. Wildlife photographer Glen Apseloff, however, thinks of the phrase as referring to the windows of his house. Using a handheld camera without a flash or special filters, he has photographed enough birds from inside his house, through closed windows, to create two books. Some of the photographs and text in this slideshow can be found in his more recent book, Backyard Birds and More—Looking Through the Glass. All of the birds in this slideshow, like all of those in his books, were taken through closed windows from inside his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.
He wrote each of the captions in the following slideshow.
Eastern Bluebirds are sexually dimorphic. Males have more blue plumage than females. These birds are sometimes called “blue robins” because of their rust-colored breast, and they’re the only birds that have the combination of a blue back and rust-colored breast.
Bluebirds nest in abandoned woodpecker holes or natural cavities in trees, but they also use man-made boxes. The Ohio Bluebird Society describes on its website how best to make and mount these boxes. The boxes should ideally face away from prevailing winds, open roads, and large bodies of water and toward a tree or shrub within 100 feet, to provide a nearby place for young birds to land.
Eastern Bluebirds and their eggs are prey to a variety of animals, everything from chipmunks and flying squirrels to House Sparrows, European Starlings, and even black bears. Most Eastern Bluebirds die in their first year of life, although the oldest documented one in the wild lived at least 10 years and 6 months. It was banded in New York in 1989 and found dead in South Carolina.
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