Birding Walk

Though the temperature was cold enough to see my breath this morning, the skies dawned clear blue and I opted out of training at the gym in favor of going for a long walk around my neighborhood.  I'm fortunate to live in an area surrounded by woodlands with maintained trails, and I've navigated a nice 4 mile loop that is a nice combination of neighborhood walking and wetland/wooded trails.  It is not uncommon to see birds of prey in the area (haws and bald eagles are frequent fliers) so I've decided to start carrying my DSLR on my walks.  Unfortunately I don't have a compact case which can house my 300mm prime, so today I took my 55-300 compact zoom.  While it is handy and lightweight, the focus at 300mm seems questionable, putting a hazy glow around pretty much anything bright (and I'm now reminded of why I stopped using it). It is decent enough to record birds for this morning, and I'll attempt to clean both ends of the lens (maybe it is just coated with something?) but if the focus doesn't improve I might retire the lens and just take the superior 50-135.  It is heavier and not as much zoom, but especially with bird ID, I really need the clarity.

On to the birds!  Although I've walked this loop many times, I was surprised by the number of birds I was able to identify when I simply took the time to pay close attention. 

Terrible photo, but these are two of the 4 shy little buffleheads who frequent the lake near my house.  They dive and swim away as soon as anyone stops on the trail, hence the distant fuzzy shot.

I found several ducks floating in a water retention pond near a busy road.  Thanks to the road noise, and a chainlink fence, they didn't seem bothered by my stopping.

These are a couple of Hooded Mergansers

Here I captured a Bufflehead on the left, several Ring-Necked ducks in the center, and the Hooded Mergansers on the right.

There was also a pair of Mallards hanging out (upper left corner)  I attempted to get all the ducks in one shot, however framing was difficult due to shooting through a chainlink fence.

On a dirt trail running along a creek/watershed area, I found this Song Sparrow.  He sat still long enough for me to pull out my cell phone to shoot a video, put my cell phone away, pull the DSLR out of my camera bag, and take a couple of photos.  He was a very patient bird!

Along the pipeline trail, listening to the distant calls of crows, I stopped short when I heard a familiar "thunk-thunk-thunk" sound... this Pileated was on a tree just a few feet from the trail.  She hid behind the tree while I pulled out my camera, and kept peeking around waiting to see if I was advancing.  When she decided I wasn't coming closer, she resumed her feast on the side of the tree.  She left when a couple of women passing by stopped to see what I was pointing my camera at.

Outside of these birds, I also heard several hummingbirds chipping loudly, and spotted crows, wrens, juncos, and black-capped chickadees (though I did not walk with my camera out, so I missed those photo ops)

Snow Birding

This morning we awoke to a land of white... the snow which has been attacking Portland for days finally crept it's way up to our neck of the woods.  It is little more than a passing thought, however, as the temperature was only cold enough to snow overnight, and quickly climbed above freezing before noon today.  It was an ideal time for me to head out into the yard with my camera, as the backdrop was a solid lovely white yet the temperature was relatively mild.  I donned my snow gear and shuffled out with my 300mm lens, pausing to listen for chirps or wing movement.

I've noticed that robins do not visit my feeders at all, yet any time I mow the lawn they tend to appear right behind me to take advantage of the newly exposed undergrowth land.  The same was true this morning, only I found the robins bouncing about in the patches of lawn left by G having made snow angels earlier in the day.  As I observed the robins and adjusted my exposure for the bright snow, this robin jumped up to the very edge of one of G's wings to scope things out.

Through the gate and around to the back, I stopped to observe some of the action around my feeders.  We have a resident song sparrow who frequently visits among a flock of juncos.  This morning she was on her own, I found her resting atop of the wood pile on the back edge of the property.

She seemed to be resting, fluffing up her feathers for warmth, so I did not want to disturb her too much by coming too close.  She watched me, though did not seem to go into any high alert mode as long as I stayed back along side one of the trees.

From that vantage point I noticed a thrush at the base of the feeders under the trees.  I attempted a few shots, but with the thrush in the shadows and the white yard in the backdrop, all I could achieve were silhouettes, and the thrush bailed before I could adjust my settings.  He flew first up into the trees, then across the yard to the feeders next to the house.  I traced my tracks back around the edge of the property to the side path, then across the yard towards the chairs in the center of the yard, attempting to use them as a blind.  They were ineffective, being too short to hide behind, and of course I made a lot of noise in the snow.  The thrush enjoyed some seeds at ground level, every so often poking his head around the flower pot to see where I was at.  He was easily startled, though, and made a dash up to the trees.  As I walked away from the trees, towards the house, the thrush came down and landed on the same wood pile as the sparrow.  Now with the forest in the back drop, the lighting was just right so all I needed to do was turn to capture a shot of the bright thrush.

By this time my toes were beginning to feel the chill, so I headed in to warm up with some hot coffee and late-morning yoga.  It was lovely to spend a Sunday morning seeking out signs of life in the wintry silence.

Falling Forward - late season boating adventures

September is a month of new routine combined with work chaos for me.  While I set and settle into the new school year hours and after school activity schedules I must simultaneously scramble with my job to complete the end of the fiscal year paperwork.  As of today my final files are delivered for work, back-to-school conferences are done, art docent training is complete, and I have about 9 months of "regular schedule" laid out before me.

Ahhh... October.

Our September has been very unusually dry (I think we only had one day of rain the whole month!) so we have been taking advantage of the sunny days and mild temperatures and enjoying some fresh air and elbow room.  A couple weekends ago we were wandering around Seattle and decided the weather was so nice we should take the boat out onto Puget Sound.  It was a spontaneous decision, so I unfortunately did not have my camera gear on me, but it was a lovely ride over calm waters.  We grabbed a few snacks at the little store in the marina, got out into the bay and crossed over the "traffic lane" to Bainbridge Island.  There we started seeing dorsal fins pop out of the water, and quickly realized we were surrounded by a pod of small porpoises.  D cut the engine and we floated off shore for a bit, watching for fins and listening to the sound of their spray as they came up for air around us.  After a bit of a pause in the ride, we continued on and circumnavigated Bainbridge while we watched the sunset over the horizon.  The next day dawned fair and sunny, so after a lovely yoga class we stopped at the store for supplies and headed back out to the marina.  D looked over some maps and did a little math and decided we should head towards Port Townsend and see how far north we could get before we'd have to turn around.  We were surprised to find that even with a couple of slow downs for a lunch picnic and navigation through a narrow, shallow channel... we were able to get to Port Townsend in just about 2 hours.  We found space at a public dock, pulled up, and had the great pleasure of walking to our favorite coffee shop for a cup of coffee and dessert.  It was slightly surreal to arrive by water, but we enjoyed it greatly.  Our return trip was on the chilly side - as sunny as the day was, dusk brought the chill over the water.  On our way back we slowed to navigate a narrow channel and we found a flock of sea birds in a great pod just ahead of us.  D slowed the boat to a crawl so that I could attempt a few pictures.  He took a picture of me taking a picture of the birds.

I was very happy about the warm light from the setting sun, however as calm as the water appears to be, it was actually quite bumpy which made focusing on moving targets extremely difficult.

Taken with my cell phone... the rest of the trip was a race against the sunset - I did not want to navigate through ferry traffic in the dark!

We are already talking about boating to Port Townsend next year, making reservations for a spot in the marina and enjoying some fishing or whale watching.

I've surprised myself with my ability to be out on the Sound in our open bow boat.  I love being near water, hearing it's movement, feeling the pulse of waves on the shore, listening to the trickling creek or the rush of a waterfall.  Being on or in the water is something else entirely.  When we first bought the boat I was dead set against going onto the Sound... from shore the Sound looks like open ocean to me, and it is plenty deep and extremely cold water.   It has been a gradual journey to go from Lake Sammamish to Lake Washington to the open waters of the Sound.  Sammamish was small and comfortable, but the docks were in terrible shape, always overcrowded, and required me to back up the trailer (which I am just not skilled at doing).  Lake Washington was much easier to launch and pull out of, but very busy with waterskiers and packed with sail boats and kayakers in Lake Union.  Although the Sound is deep and cold and wavy, it has breathing space, and the convenience of a marina so we no longer have to go through the tedious task of launching and loading every single time we want to be on the water.  The marina itself is an incredibly peaceful place for me to be... the wind blows through the tall masts of the sailboats, there are always heron and ducks and kingfishers meandering about, and the occasional harbor seal will glide around spying on us from a distance.  Heading out of the marina, we have a complete view of Seattle and Elliott Bay.  My cell phone's camera lens does not do it justice.

It has taken a lot of time, and practice, and deep breathing but I am slowly gaining better control over my panic attacks, and I'm finding that I not only "deal with" being on the Sound, but I actually look forward to it with great enthusiasm.  My only main concern now is when we cross the "traffic lane" - the center of the Sound where all the giant barges and cruise ships pass through, leaving massive undulating wakes in their path.  D has become quite skilled in boating over the wakes - depending on the speed he will even angle the boat so that we surf along the crest of a wake until the waves die down.  If we are near shore and puttering at low speed I can almost relax entirely, but when we are out in open water at full speed I will wear my life vest for extra peace of mind, and usually have a white-knuckled grip on the windshield.  Technically our boat is designed to go 40 miles out into the ocean for tuna fishing, so short of a tsunami I don't believe anything in the Sound would ever tip it.  Logic just doesn't penetrate panic, so I have to learn to breathe through it and talk myself down in my head.

It's a bit ironic that I find it so relaxing to be someplace that causes me to have panic attacks, but in the end it's the sound and smell of the water and the view of the wildlife that wins.

Bird Paparazzi

Thank you to everyone who helped offer words of advice/support/suggestions/etc... in my quest to narrow down my entry to the Audubon Society's bird photo contest :)  Having multiple sets of fresh eyes on my work helped me a great deal in shaving my selection down to the maximum 10 entries.

...then I found a most friendly and relatively fearless Pileated Woodpecker frequenting my feeders and I kept on my obsessive shooting ways, which added a few new photos to the mix.

In the end, after a great deal of consideration, re-editing, and mulling things over, here are the 10 shots I decided to submit to the Audubon Society:

Barred Owl (A sentimental favorite of mine)

Bittern's Lunch (Of the entire series, my favorite due to the fantastic view of the frog)

Heron in Flight (This shot goes to show how much you can change the mood of an image with a little cropping)

Dancing Crow (I truly think crows are overlooked as being so common, but they are such amazingly clever creatures, they are a joy to watch) 

Baby Juncos (Can't. Resist. Cute. Fluffy.) 

Vacationing (Juvenile Yellow Crowned Night Heron - I love his piercing red eye) 

Pileated Photobomb - (The angle of this shot will forever crack me up - "whatcha doin?  Oh, is that a camrea?") 

Keeping a Watchful Eye (Woody - the male - watches across the yard while Wilma - the female - grooms her feathers) 

Curious Pileated (This is Jr.  He would often pause from eating to watch me and my camera lens, then go back to eating) 

Mother's Nest - (Red billed streamertail female on her nest in the gardens of a resort in Jamaica.  The nest is completely out in the open in a high traffic part of the garden, yet tough to see if she is not sitting on it - I was actually standing on the walking path outside the hotel's kitchen... that brown wall in the background is the door to the office.)

This project has helped me to realize just how many bird photos I've managed to collect over the years... I am now contemplating making my 2013 calendar entirely out of bird photos.  Hell, I could probably make an entire calendar just on pileated shots!

Bird is the Word

I think my lack of posting for 2 months has probably eliminated what little audience I had left here... but I'm resurrecting and pressing on anyway.

(Does that make this a zombie blog?)

Audubon Society has a bird photography contest going on... the deadline is end of August so I have some time to prepare.  When I saw that we could enter up to 10 photos I wondered if I would have enough decent images to complete a whole entry.  Then I dug through my backlog of photo files and realized just how often my lens' attention is turned to birds.

After reading carefully through the rules (no "captive" photos allowed - meaning, no zoo shots) and cutting out any shots that included bird feeders (technically those are not "captive" shots, but they don't exactly look wild either) I have narrowed my selections down to the low-low number of...

52.

Editing down any further has been a harder process than I'd imagined.  Many of the shots are exciting to me simply because of my own interest of particular species, but that doesn't mean the shot themselves are spectacular.  Some are shots I find somewhat boring because they were shot in my back yard, yet others really like them for the framing and subject.  Some of the shots are the same image cropped differently, some are the same subject from different angles, and I can't decide which I like better.  

So I have collected the 52 images into an album online... and I welcome any thoughts, critiques, ideas, insight, lists of favorites or any other comments anyone might have to help me narrow this down to the top 10 images.

A Pair of Pileated Peckers

Woodpeckers.  Get your mind out of the gutter.
Geesh.

We've lived in our house for over 7 years.  I remember within days of moving in I began hearing what would soon become the familiar calls of the Pileated woodpeckers.  These are the big guys... about the size of a crow, with the bright red mohawks that the character Woody Woodpecker was fashioned after.  They are generally reclusive birds... we hear their calls echo through the neighborhood, and recognize their signature "WHAP! WHAP! WHAP!" pecking on dead wood.

Contrary to what the cartoon shows, they do not sound like the rapidfire "rat-tat-tat-tat-tat"... around here that's the sound of a sapsucker announcing his territory.  The Pileateds are deliberate in their hunt for food, sounding more like a craftsman thudding his hammer with careful aim.  On rare occasions I've managed to sneak up and see them at work on a dead log.  They tip their head to the side, examining the wood... then they pull their head back as far as it will go and throw it forward with all their might, as if their beak were a sledgehammer.  Every time I see it, I expect them to pull their heads back and shake them, I cannot imagine how they do this without seeming to feel the least bit of pain or dizziness.  They appear entirely unaffected by the blow, and they line themselves up to do it again.

Their call is very similar to the cartoon (not the beginning laughing part, but the way Woody sings that last note over and over... ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha) though in the wild their pitch sounds more similar to a laughing hyena than the cartoon bird... "kak-kak-kak-kak-kak-kak-kak-kak!"

For 7 years they have been my backyard nemesis... the elusive Bird I Could Not Photograph.  They are the grand pooh-ba in neighborhood bird watching (at least, between my next-door-neighbor and I, who seem to be equal in our enthusiasm for the feathered critters)  Most of the times I've seen them I was unable to get my camera fast enough.  One time I saw one on a neighbor's log and I had my cell phone, but in that instance the phone would not focus (though it focused fine 2 minutes later, after the bird took flight)  Once I saw one sleeping in the tree in my front yard.  I did not want to run the risk of losing the opportunity, so I did not bother to change out of my pink pajamas... but nabbed my camera and tripod and dashed out front.  I had pictures, but as the bird was asleep in the tree, the photos only show an unrecognizable black blob on the tree bark.

Last Christmas D bought me a few bird houses for the yard, with the intent to put them up on posts this spring.  In the midst of researching the best way to put them out in the yard (to prevent marauders from gaining access) D began brainstorming squirrel baffles.  In order to test his designs, he devised a plan to put in a temporary post in the yard and hang a collection of bird feeders from it - if the squirrels cannot get up to the food that they clearly want, then the baffles will work for the birdhouses (which they should be less interested in anyway)  So he placed a bit wooden post in a corner near our patio, collected a bunch of my feeders from around the yard, and set up what is now a substantial feeding station.

The experiment has created an unexpected turn of events.  The tall wooden post, combined with a long narrow suet feeder filled with peanut-based suet, appears to be the ideal combination for pileated woodpeckers.  Within days of setting up the feeders we began noticing pileateds hanging around the yard.  I've dashed out of the house a few times to get pictures... some of them were fuzzy (low light + fast bird) and many times I've scared the birds away.  But... they keep coming back.  Daily.  They seem to have grown so accustom to us that I can approach the feeders to about 10 feet before they fly away.

They other day I noticed the feeder was almost empty, so I walked out to fill it and didn't even notice the female was on the backside of the post.  She didn't see me either, and I was 5 feet away before she took flight, landing on the side of the tree behind me.  She watched me fill the feeder, then flew immediately back to it as soon as I'd turned and walked a few steps away.

As they have come back with such frequency, I'm now referring to them as our Resident Pileateds.  I have several shots of both of them at the feeders, but I'm also trying to capture them with more of their own habitat as the surroundings.

These photos are 7 years in the making (cropped down to show both birds in one frame)  The Grand Pooh-bas of Backyard Birding:

I'm thinking the male (on the left) should be named Woody, I haven't decided what to call the female yet.

A bird in the hand...

This has been a big week of birding opportunities for me, and all by luck and happenstance.

While waiting for a ferry, I looked out the truck window and noticed a belted kingfisher sitting on a rope at the dock.  I stepped out to zoom in and get a shot, and he flew down onto a rock near the water's edge.

As I focused on this little gem, I heard D next to me clear his throat and say "did you notice what is standing next to him?"  Not 5 feet from the kingfisher was a great blue heron.

After snapping happily away for a good 15 minutes, the great bird flew off.  I wandered back toward the truck then looked up and noticed a massive wingspan in the air, so I high tailed it back down towards the water, where I found the seagulls harassing a young bald eagle.

This is the closest I've managed to get to a baldy in the wild.  He stayed for maybe 5 or so minutes, dodging gulls with a sort of shrugging-off attitude... then I heard the heron call, and that was enough to send Mr. Eagle back to his perch high in the trees.  The heron came and replaced the eagle on the pillar for a few minutes, before gliding back down to *his* spot in the water.

All in all I shot about 150 images of just these three birds.  This 30 or so minute experience makes up for the months of winter dry spell for me.