Post #59 - Colombia, part 2

Well, I am back in Los Estados Unidos after 9 days in Colombia! This trip was just fantastic, introducing me to many new birds, places, and people. Recall that I was part of a press trip designed to highlight the birding opportunities along the Northern Colombia Birding Trail, a multilateral venture designed to boost the economic standing of the the region through ecotourism, specifically birdwatching. Anyway, I can report that the project looks like it has a ton of potential, both for visiting birders and the residents of Caribbean Colombia. I will actually be writing a series of in-depth blog posts about our time in the region for the National Audubon Society website in the next few weeks. As a result, I am going to keep this update rather brief so as to avoid double-posting, self-plagiarizing, or violating some otherwise obscure aspect of copyright law should I write the same thing both on this blog and the Audubon blog. Also, the Audubon Society has kindly requested that I save what photos I took on the trip for their website. The plan is to cross link what blogging I do for them here so that my regular readers won't miss anything. There is a nice photo teaser at the end of this post to set the stage though!

Area around Santa Marta, days 3-5
(days 1 and 2 were spent slightly farther east,
map on previous post)

We spent a total of 5 days in Caribbean Colombia. These were split between coastal estuaries, dry forest, lowland forest, and higher elevation cloud forest. Briefly, I will say that the geography of the Santa Marta area and adjacent Guajira Peninsula is particularly interesting. Pico Cristobal Colon (bottom right in above picture) is roughly 19,000 feet high. As the peak is located just 30 miles from the coast, nowhere else in the world can such a high peak be found in such close proximity to the ocean. What this means for birders is that a large number of habitats can be experienced in a very small area. Waterbirds were present in large numbers along the coast, and hummingbirds, trogons, tanagers, hummingbirds, woodcreepers, and parrots were expectedly in great supply in more forested areas. We put much effort into finding species endemic (restricted) to the region and were largely successful on that front. A notable find were 3 Blue-billed Currasows at Tayrona. With a population estimated between 200 and 500 birds, it is certainly one of the rarest birds on the planet. We otherwise recorded in excess of 200 species, all of which but the water birds (shorebirds, herons) were life birds for me.

My lodgings at El Dorado Lodge in the El Dorado cloud forest

After 5 days on the Caribbean Coast, we flew south to Cali where we attended the Colombian Bird Fair for the final 3 days of our trip. Styled much like and American birding festival with field trips during the days and talks at night, it was a huge success. Colombia is really doing its best to sell itself as the next big ecotourism destination, and the fair did a great job of doing exactly this. With 1,900 species of birds found within the country, it shouldn't be tough to lure birders to Colombia!

Collared Trogon - Trogon collaris

Canon 500mm f/4 IS on EOS 7D2
1/200 at f/7.1, ISO 1600
(f/7.1 to get whole bird in focus, 1600 since light was quite bad)

Post #58 - Colombia introduction and happenings!

Greetings from Colombia! I arrived in Bogotá late Saturday night, and, after a quick sleep, my group of 11 boarded our flight to Riohacha on the Caribbean Coast. This small beach city is the last significant outpost as one moves northeast towards to the Guajira peninsula which Colombia shares with neighboring Venezuela. It is also right now the eastern end of the Northern Colombia Birding Trail, a joint venture between several US agencies, the National Audubon Society included, and a number of Colombian entities designed to boost birding and ecotourism in the region. The hope is that birding will bring much needed revenue to that particular part of the country while giving local people a valuable stake in the preservation of the various habitats that span the trail's length. To this end, much time and effort has been spent training local bird guides in the last year. There is now a wide knowledge base to accompany the many birding opportunities that the region holds. I am actually part of a press tour that is designed to spotlight these precise opportunities. With representatives from the America Birding Association, National Geographic Society, National Public Radio, The National Audubon Society, and a host of Colombian media outlets, I am quite honored to be a part of the fun.

Where in the world is Dorian?

The rough area we've covered in our first two days

Without getting into too much detail right now, let me just say that I have been thoroughly impressed with what I have seen in just the first two days I have here been. Both birds and local guides are plentiful, and there seems to be a real ground swell within the local communities we have visited. Just today, our group knocked into at least 4 other groups, each of which was being taken around by one of the program's guides. It is already looking as though connecting communities through birding will provide them a valuable economic base while coincidently providing the incentive to conserve the resources on which that base is built. I will say that this part of Colombia is decidedly third world. Cinder block dwellings are commonplace and resources are understandably limited. That being said the residents have been very friendly and accommodating, and I felt nothing but warmth from the communities we have visited. The food is fantastic, and, by American standards, incredibly inexpensive. Lodging has been equally amazing. Skeptical? Here's where we're staying tonight!

  

Casa Barlovento

I understand that Colombia has a bit of a checkered past, but the country has really stabilized in the last decade. The Colombian half of our contingency is simply wonderful. I had a particularly nice time talking about Boston with one woman who studied policy at Harvard for 2 years. What preconceptions many might have about the country are exactly that, preconceptions. Yes, there are goats running around in the streets in the rural areas, but that's how much of the world lives outside of the bubble that is the US of A. Traveling here in Colombia has proven no different than in Costa Rica as far as I am concerned. Colombia still lags well behind Costa Rica in developing a full-fledged ecotourism program, but with 1,900 bird species in the country, there is a heck of a lot of potential! I'll be spending 3 more days up here on the Caribbean Slope before heading down to the southern end of the country for 3 days in Cali. I'll have more bird-related programming at some point, but for a first pass I really wanted to give folks a ground's-eye view of what things look like. 

Our group with local guides 

(yellow shirt, back, and red shirt, front)

Kids being, well....kids. Its the same the world over.
The colors in Colombia are simply beautiful.

The universal symbol for "I'm cool"....

 

Suffice it to say we've seen orioles, hummingbirds, antshrikes, antwrens, saltators, tanagers, parrots, spinetails, tody-flycatchers, puffbirds, and a host of other typically tropical families. The opportunities really are endless! There will be lots of birds at some point, so please stay tuned!

Post #57 - Birding the Channel Islands, and HUGE NEWS for next week!

I added an ABA bird to my life list this weekend (#702!) and that's still not even close to the biggest news coming out of The Speckled Hatchback this week! OK, OK, keep your pants on. We have to dispense with some other exciting business before I can let the big cat out of the bag!

This weekend Sonia and I hopped aboard the Island Packers now annual combination inshore pelagic and Island Scrub Jay boat trip. The idea was to cruise around the Channel Islands before stopping on Santa Cruz Island for a few hours to find the Island Scrub Jay, a species that prior to 1996 was considered conspecific with both the Western and Florida flavors of Scrub Jay. I have actually seen the Scrub Jay on 2 previous trips to Santa Cruz Island (one in 1996 and one in 2009 - see photo), so my main target on this weekend's trip was Scripps's Murrelet, a small, black-and-white alcid/auk that breeds on the Channel Islands. I had managed to miss that bird on several other SoCal boat trips, so I hoped to redeem those past dips this weekend. 

Sonia and I visiting the Channel Islands in 2009.

We had been dating for 9 months at that stage.

Why she didn't run for the exit then I have no idea.

The entire day was perfect, seas and weather included. Birds were plentiful, and we had a number of nice bonus finds on top of the usual suspects. First, we saw upwards of 80 (yes, 80!) Brown Boobies on Anacapa Island. This generally more tropical species, once cause for birding alarm bells in SoCal, has become effectively resident in the last 15 years. We do not know the exact reason for this northward range expansion, but higher water temperatures due to global warming are a prime suspect. Anyway, mixed in with the Brown Boobies was a single Blue-footed Booby (BFBO), a fantastic find for SoCal! Everyone on board was stoked when this guy appeared! Interestingly, I saw ~50 BFBOs in SoCal in October of 2013. That was a monumental invasion, but not a single bird of those I saw on that trip was a blue-footed adult. The bird this weekend was a real treat!

Anacapa Island from the boat

Hiking on Santa Cruz Island

       
BF Booby! Decent despite terrible backlighting....

I did finally collect my Scripps's Murrelet. After many distant and disappointing views, a few pairs floated close enough to the boat to permit decent views and record photographs. The boat was pitching around quite a bit by that stage of the afternoon, so that I got anything was a source of celebration. A huge flock (~1000) of Surf Scoters, a couple Mew Gulls, a single Island Scrub Jay, hundreds of dolphins, several Gray Whales, and a breaching Humpback Whale rounded out a fantastic day on the water. For those that want to tick the Scrub Jay, I would highly recommend this particular boat trip. Island Packers runs daily trips to and from Santa Cruz Island, but only on this late February trip is the boat utilized explicitly for the purposes of birding (hence the pelagic component). I actually saw Scripp's Murrelet, then Xantus' Murrelet, on my 2009 trip, but the boat kept steaming along since it wasn't a birding specific trip. My view was so poor I decided not to count that bird, hence it was a lifer this weekend.

Scripps's Murrelet! ABA bird #702!

Not bad considering terrible midday light

Periscope up!

This is not the most technically sound shot, but I think

it perfectly represents how alcids are most often observed.

Now for the really BIG NEWS. I have decided who I will support in the 2016 presidential election! Just joking! I'm not even going to touch that topic here. I will admit that's it sometimes difficult not to comment on the insanity that is American Politics, but I hope to continue to make this blog a refuge from that particular brand of noise. 


So without further ado, I will tell you that The Speckled Hatchback will be coming to you live and direct from Colombia next week! That's right, South America here I come! I have been invited to join a 10-day, National Audubon Society-, Calidris-, and Colombia National Parks-sponsored trip to Colombia that will highlight ecotourism possibilities and sustainable resource management in the recently stabilized country. I will be functioning as a photographer and writer, specifically blogging about the trip on the Audubon Society website once I return. I post live snippets on this blog when internet access permits. I leave Saturday so updates will start to flow in sometime after that.  We will be visiting the Caribbean Slope, Santa Marta, and Perijá regions before moving south to Cali for the 3 day Colombia Birdfair. For those interested in some background on birding in Colombia, please see this recently published feature article in Audubon Magazine. We will be recapitulating much of this itinerary, so it should be amazing. Here is a link to a video of the Northern Colombia Birding Trail, a project designed to included locals in the development of a birding and ecotourism industry. With 1,900 bird species, the most of any country, Colombia should be at the top of every birder's "someday" list.

It all starts in 5 days, so please check back in soon!

Post #56 - Could birds and birding be in my professional future?

Many of you know at least a bit about my personal history. For those that don't, let's just suffice it to say that I built a reasonably successful career as an academic scientist before, in 2014, leaving that increasingly frustrating trajectory to ride my bike around the country and look for birds. Before I left, I had no idea how the adventure would unfold, nor what the heck I would do to pay my bills when I returned. Since that adventure ended, I have actually returned to academic science as postdoctoral fellow at USC. Part of this was due to economic necessity, part to a lack of other (i.e. biotech) options, and part to the fact that I still do enjoy some aspects of academic research, particularly mentoring undergraduates and graduate students. The problem is that there really isn't anywhere I can go from my current position. Not only did I give up any chance of real advancement when I stepped out of the pipeline the first time, but I still don't want the life that I think that pipeline would prescribe even if it was still open to me. So, at present, I find myself, a hyper-motivated individual, working a stop-gap job with no solid plan for the long-term. It is incredibly frustrating and at times equally unsatisfying.

Now for the good news. What I did not expect is that the bike trip has opened quite a few doors in the birding world, and I am starting to wonder if at some point birds and birding might be my vocation as opposed to something that I do when my vocation and my LA commute to it affords me time. Speaking at birding festivals and similarly bird-centric gatherings has proven to be incredibly enjoyable, on par with birding itself. Guiding, albeit just in the capacity of day outings at festivals, has been very rewarding, giving me the opportunity to share my love of birds with others while coincidently socializing with tour participants. I really enjoy writing about birds and birding. That's the primary reason I try to keep up this blog, simply because I enjoy it. I was recently asked to contribute an essay to the sequel to "Real Birders Don't Wear White", so at least a few people think I can write a level above that of a salamander. Hell, you too have read this far!  Who knows, maybe I can cobble together some sort of eclectic but coherent, bird-centric vocation moving forward. I am so far from being able to transition out of my current situation that I feel a bit funny even discussing this, but hey, this is what's on my mind right now and I think putting my feelings out there every once in a while might interest someone, somewhere.

As for birds, I spent an entire day out on Sunday of this past weekend. I squeezed out 128 species around Orange County. The highlight of the day was the 2 hours I spent chasing this Eurasian Wigeon around a local park pond. I have seen quite a few of these, but I have never been even remotely close enough to photograph decently. One thing I can say is that when I am working with a bird, trying to get that perfect frame, nothing else matters but the subject and my interaction with it. It could have been raining $100 bills behind me and I would never have noticed as long as this guy was in my viewfinder!

Eurasian Wigeon - Anus penelope

Canon 400mm f/5.6 on EOS 7D2

1/2500 at f/5.6, ISO 400

Post #55 - Super Bird Sunday - seeking ABA #700!

I obtained my first field guide, The Golden Guide to North American Birds, when I was 7 years old. Mesmerized by the diversity and beauty of the birds there depicted, I dreamed that one day I might see every bird in it. As I established my birding roots around Philadelphia and South Jersey during my youth, I came to appreciate that the 700-species plateau was for many North American birders a lifelong goal. I thus at age 10 decided that I too would do my birding best, through whatever means possible, to join that 700 club. By age 12 I had racked up roughly 200 species in my local area. My inaugural trip to Arizona in 1991 took me to near 300 species, and visits to Texas and Washington State in subsequent years helped push me north of 400. Though academics and heavy drinking distracted me form birding during my college years, I reached 500 species while an undergraduate at Stanford, and 600 on a trip to South Texas in 2008 while I was in graduate school at NYU. Since I quit drinking and obtained my Ph.D. in 2010, the past 5 years have seen a steady increase in my birding activity, most notably my 2014 bicycle Big Year, Biking for Birds, that took me nearly 18,000 miles around the lower 48 states on what was certainly the adventure of a lifetime. Bird photography (view at Smugmug and  Flickr) has become my latest addiction, and I now spend as much time seeking that elusive 'perfect shot' as I do engaged in more traditional birding. 

My best shot from this past weekend......
Northern Pintail X Mallard hybrid! 

Canon 500mm f/4 IS + 1.4x III on EOS 7D2

1/3200 at f/5.6, ISO 800, Manual, Handheld

Anyway, now that you are up to speed on my birding history, we'll join the present. In the last post, I chronicled my experience at the fantastic Laredo Birding Festival from February 3-6. I arrived at that event sitting at 698 species for North America. I did not expect to add any lifers in the Laredo area, but, as I had made it that far, I decided to use the extra Sunday, Super Bowl Sunday, to run south to the Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) to chase a number of rarities that had been reported in the days leading up to and during the festival. As the festival concluded at 9pm Saturday and my flight back to LA left Laredo at 6:30am on Monday, this left me just 12 intervening daylight hours to conduct my birding business. I would in the darkness that surrounded that window, need to drive from Laredo to the LRGV and back. The whole thing turned out to be a whirlwind!

I picked up my rental car at the Laredo Airport at 9:30pm on Saturday night. I sprinted to Mission, arriving just after midnight. I caught a few ZZZs, and by 7am was at Frontera Audubon to search for my first two target birds, the Code 4 female Crimson-collared Grosbeak that head been present for weeks and the just-that-week-arrived Code 4 male Blue Bunting. Accompanied by LRGV birding belle Tiffany Kersten, I managed, after a 3-hour search, a brief but serviceable look at the grosbeak for ABA #699! This species in notoriously reclusive, so that I got any look at it was a cause for celebration. Had it not given its distinctive whistle, there was no way in hell I would have found the stealthy bird. As it was, I did not manage any sort of photograph. The bunting proved painfully elusive, and was left on the table when we left Frontera to head to Estero Llano Grande to pursue the White-throated Thrush, another Code 4 rarity, that had been reported from that location for the past 2 days.

The grosbeak was back in that tangle somewhere!

The search for the thrush was anything but protracted. We parked, walked to the fruiting tree around which the thrush had been hanging, waited 2 minutes, and a BOOM - there it appeared 20 feet in front of our faces! Species number 700 was just too easy! Thirty years in the waiting, I finally joined the 700-club! A quiet celebration ensued but was short-lived as we quickly turned our attention to yet another Code 4 rarity, the Northern Jacana that has been hanging around Santa Ana NWR for the past 6 weeks. 

White-throated Thrush for ABA #700 - Woo Hoo!

Tiffany and I spent the next 1.5 hours searching in vain for the jacana. Our frustrations were compounded by the fact that several other people had seen the bird that morning; Even using their advice, we were unable to locate the stealthy wader in any of the Willow Lakes at the refuge. 

Rather than continuing the jacana battle, we decided to double back to Frontera for a second shot at the bunting. We arrived to miss the bird at its favorite watering spot by 2 minutes, but I relocated it not too far from that spot 10 minutes after that. It gave me a brief but breath-taking view in full sunlight before disappearing into the same impenetrable understory that obscured the grosbeak earlier in the day. Tiffany came over and we managed several brief but serviceable views beyond my initial encounter. I did my best to get a photo, but all I could muster was an OOF (out-of-focus) blue blob amidst the tangle. A better photo would have been nice, but the heart-stopping view the bird initially gave me was memory enough. Bird #701 was secured, buffering me from falling below the 700-line when Hoary and Common Redpolls are most certainly lumped in the near future. The bunting was even more stunning than I had imagined, besting the more familiar Indigo Bunting in the iridescent blue department.
 

Blue Bunting for #701

With the first 3 of my target birds safely secured, it was time to race back to Santa Ana for one last shot at the jacana. Tirelessly walking the trails around the ponds, Tiffany and I scoured the reedy and marshy surrounds for what would be the fourth Code 4 rarity of the day. We had been birding non-stop for nearly 11 hours at that stage, and, as the sun sank lower into the western sky, it took with it our hopes of finding the jacana. We folded our hand at 6:00pm, in time for me to drop Tiffany at home and race back to Laredo by 9:30pm so as not to incur an additional charge on my 1-day car rental.

All smiles, even minus the jacana.

It's tough to argue with 3 Code 4 rarities in a single day!

The entire day was a huge success. It was a great way to record species number 700; That I recorded two other, equally rare species on the same day made it all the more memorable. Tiffany was great company and very patient in helping me chase down the birds I needed, sometimes even ahead of the Blue Bunting that she needed for her own ABA list. Reaching 700 species felt incredibly good, but has only whet my appetite to continue birding and photographing. I have not yet birded Alaska, so that's a destination with loads of new birds and photographic opportunities that is certainly in my future. Sonia, my fiance, has become an increasingly capable birder, and I cannot wait to see what amazing things we will find together in out future travels! Right now my "Seen with Sonia" list might be my most fun!

I want to thank everyone who has helped me in any aspect of my birding over the years, as well as you readers who tune in to hear where my birding has recently taken me. At the end of the day, its the fellow birders that imbue our birding experiences with their most indelible colors. Without the people, birding is, well, for the birds.......

The next life bird bird I'll seek will be Scripps's Murrelet on a February 28th pelagic out of Ventura. Stay tuned, much more birding, photography, and associated nonsense coming your way!

(As a quick aside, I count only well-seen birds on my ABA list. I have heard both Black Rail and Buff-collared Nightjar in the ABA area but neither is included in my total. The Red-legged Honeycreeper from Texas in 2014 is still pending, as is the Gray Thrasher that I observed in San Diego in August of 2015. So, who knows? Maybe I'll be at 703 without having to lift my binoculars!)

Post #54 - Laredo Birding Festival! Thoughts on a birding lobby.....

Yee haw!!! Greetings from Texas! Well sort of. I am actually back in LA after spending Wednesday through Saturday of last week in Southern Texas at the Laredo Birding Festival (LBF). This was only my second true birding festival, but boy was it a good one! The little brother of the much larger and well-known Lower Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival (LRGVBF), the LBF provides an equally good opportunity for participants to view many of the South Texas specialty birds including kingfishers, orioles, flycatchers, and jays. This year, the LBF was limited to 110 participants, almost all of which stayed at the fantastic La Posada Hotel. This made for a very intimate experience as field trips included a maximum of just 10 participants. I presented a lecture on the second night of the event, and I functioned as a birding guide for each of the three days. In short, I had a blast. The weather was perfect, the birds plentiful, White-collared Seedeaters generally cooperative, and the attendees enthusiastic. For those folks thinking about a trip to Texas, the LBF might be the perfect opportunity when it rolls around again next February!

La Posada courtyard

Birders at Salineno

Birders at private ranch north of Laredo

Here is the log book from Salineno. I last visited Nov. 24, 2014

during my bicycle Big Year in 2014!  It is organized by state, hence

everyone on this page was from MA. This time I signed the CA page.

 

One interesting fact about Texas is that only 2-4% of the total land area (depending on who you ask) is held by the state or federal government. Stated another way, roughly 97% of the land in Texas is privately owned. This means that it is critical for conservation entities to liaise with local landowners if anything is to be accomplished. The LBF itself works closely with local ranchers to secure access  to private land that is otherwise restricted, and it is this access that really makes the festival special. Much of the land I birded is open only during the festival, and I felt quite privileged to have been able to bird many of the amazing ranches surrounding Laredo. Several of the cooperating ranchers even attended the closing dinner on Satuday night. Beyond the incredible company and birding, I think the LBF serves as a model for how birding entities should interact with the communities in which they operate. 

Closing dinner. I was the "churro assassin", consuming

at least 8 of the sugary treats on top of an equally absurd

number of tostadas.

 

The closing dinner was held in a local arts center. Local school children contributed all of the artwork you can see in the photo, and festival organizers, local artists, and members of the city council were on hand to award prizes to particularly outstanding pieces. One point that was repeatedly hammered home was the economic impact of the festival on the community. I think that this is a consideration often ignored by birders, that is that our collective financial worth actually matters to the communities that we visit. While I am not advocating the creation of a "birding lobby" it would be very interesting if birders found a way to throw their collective weight around more than we currently do. Birding is one of the most popular hobbies in the country, and our contribution to local economies is many instances is significant. National organizations like the Audubon Society certainly carry come amount of clout, but even I as a seasoned birder feel disconnected from most of them. Maybe at some future point I will ponder how might we birders might better nucleate to effect changes that benefit both birds and the communities connected to them. 

I'll leave you with the best photo that I grabbed during the festival. Most of my time was focused on making sure attendees got their target birds, but I did grab a few seconds to myself to grab this frame!

Altamira Oriole - Icterus gularis

Canon 400mm f/5.6 on EOS 7D2

1/2500 at f/5.6, ISO 800

Post #53 - Birding? Cancelled! The interply of aesthetics and apertures in bird photography....

First, the Ignite Channel put together a nice piece about my 2014 adventure. Please give it a click and take a look, before or after your usual Speckled Hatchback fix. Now, on with the usual nonsense, errrr show, umm, whatever!

You know that feeling when the universe feels as though it is actively conspiring to stop you from doing whatever it that you want to do? Yeah, that was this past weekend. Originally forecast as crystal clear, Saturday morning was cloudy. This crushed any hope of quality photography. Light rain in the afternoon forced additional route and strategy alterations, but the worst was still to come. Transiting along the Pacific Coast Highway between Newport and Huntington Beach, our admittedly already testy car decided right then would be the perfect place to die completely! We coasted into a roadside parking lot from where Triple-A was called, a tow truck summoned, and birding, like our car, declared dead-on arrival. We had "Petra" towed to out usual shop where she would stay for the rest for Sunday and Monday. Heavy rain Sunday would have effectively crushed birding even if Petra had been functional, so yeah, like I said, birding seemed doomed from the start. I guess its tough to get too upset about rain anywhere in California, these days, right?

Birding fail! (note rain)

 

This is how Saturday felt....

So, in lieu of fanciful birding tales from the weekend, I'll flip into photo mode for a short while. Photographers often use the term "bokeh" to describe how a lens or particular lens settings render out of focus points of light and, by proxy, structures. What do I mean by this? Here is a photo of a Ring-necked Duck that I took a few weeks ago and have held off sharing until a slow birding cycle!

Ring-necked Duck - Aythya collaris

Orange County, California

Canon 500mm f/4 IS on EOS 7D2

1/3200 at f/4, ISO 400

The bokeh here is the blurred water both in front of and behind the subject duck. It helps to frame the subject and to smooth out what could be potentially distracting elements in both the foreground and background. In this particular shot, I have strengthened the effect by taking a very low perspective on the subject. This leaves only a thin focal plane through which the subject in swimming; The rest of the image is a blur, or bokeh.

Photographers generally manipulate two parameters to obtain to correct exposure and artistic rendering in a photograph: aperture and shutter speed. Aperture is the size of the hole through which the light is focused onto the sensor, and shutter speed is the time that the hole is open. Bird photography is generally done at very wide apertures so as to freeze, without motion blur, whatever action in being captured. Luckily for me and my particular shooting style, wide apertures are generally the best at producing bokeh as they render out-of-plane light and structures more strongly out of focus or blurred. One thing to note is that large apertures are designated by smaller f-stop (f/) numbers; Hence f/2.8 lets in more light and creates more out-of-focus blur than f/8. 

Aperture range of a standard lens. Moving 1-stop either

halves or doubles the amount of light the hole lets in.

 Larger apertures (small f/) produce better background blur

 

Every photographer has a different style. I personally really like strong bokeh as it helps, in my opinion, to focus the viewer's directly attention on the subject. For those that prefer including more habitat, they generally close the lens down a bit so as to get more depth of field on the surroundings. While I sometimes like that style, it is tough to argue with beautifully blurred backgrounds! Here is one of my old photos that I particular like!

Pectoral Sandpiper

Canon 500mm f/4 IS on Canon 1D Mark IV

1/3200 at f/4 ISO 400