New Bird to the Count, 155 birds photographed. This is not the best picture, they were pretty far away and it was early morning light. But the bird in the back with the wings out is the new bird. I am not positive, it is either a Bonaparte Gull, or perhaps a laughing gull.
But I did not even notice it until I saw this photo. But I bet Brian from Wildlife Intrigued will know. He is my go to person for bird names. Plus he writes some excellent post with humor and lots of great photos.
One can never take enough photos of these little plovers. They are just so darn cute.
Its Almost the Weekend, hope you have a great one full of good food, laughter and good weather. These pelicans are enjoying the morning, everyday is a Friday for them. 🙂
Here is the link to visit my video of the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge in Washington. Nisqually Wildlife Refuge. 🙂
Birding in Washington, This cute little warbler found a tasty morsel for its lunch. Even though some of these bugs can bug us when we are out and about. They do supply nutrients to so many other animals and birds.
This young eagle was flying by and I snapped a quick photo of it. The photo is a bit blurry but I never throw away a photo if I can make a painting out of it as the next photo shows.
Imagination helps us to create art, I can picture it and it then comes to life on my digital canvas.
Lots of Eagles Nisqually, we continue our hike along the boardwalks at the Nisqually National Wildlife refuge. Where the walkway goes way out into the sound. The tide was out when we were there and the people were out as well enjoying all the eagles, young and old ones. People and birds, 🙂
The eagles were quite far away, but the best part of seeing all these eagles, was actually hearing them as they called back and forth. Nothing prettier then the sound of eagles calling I think.
Nisqually National Wildlife Area, Billy Frank Jr. Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge is located on the Interstate 5 corridor, 20 miles south of Tacoma Washington and 8 miles east of Olympia in the Nisqually Valley.
The area is not easily missed when driving on the highway – the vista opens up and the estuary leading to South Puget Sound is visible on the north side of the interstate.
We were camping not to far this wildlife refuge. This is one of the first things we look for when we are in a new area and this was only 10 min from our campsite.
An amazing place for sure, board walks throughout the area and photographers every where. It was so much fun to see so many people carrying tri pods and cameras. Everyone being quiet so we don’t spook the birds.
This is where I photographed this Red Breasted Sap Sucker below.
A fox hiding in the grass.
This big old barn was on the refuge, maybe it was a farm at one point. This barn is huge and there are two of them here. I do like the old barns. They just don’t build them like that anymore.
This was the location I spotted my first Rufous Hummingbird as well. This park is over 3000 acres and we walked a lot of it. But I do hope to go there again to see more of the 200 species of birds that stop there during migration.
The Kingfisher, I am getting closer to taking a good photo of this beautiful bird. I take my chair and camera and just sit still where it likes to fish. One has to have lots of patience and sit very still for these birds to not take off. This is the fun part of wildlife photography for me.
Bird Art Tells a Story, As I look at all the photos I take, I am looking for a certain pose when it comes to bird photography. On average one or two photos out of 20 will be good when photographing wildlife, especially if you are using burst on your camera.
When it comes to bird photography, I like to save the shots where the bird is looking away or looking down. Almost as if it is thinking about something or daydreaming.
With Blue Herons, it is easy to get a shot like this because they are normally looking down at the water for food. I love the light in this photo, just enough shadow and light to create a nice piece of art work for me.
If you are a beginner in photography and want to practice photographing birds. Pick birds like the Blue Heron or Egrets and even Pelicans. They are a little slower which gives you plenty of time to practice focusing your camera, even in flight, they are fun birds to photograph.
Fog and Sunshine Photography, this time of year there are a lot of foggy days in the south. Which I love for photography. This blue heron is perched on a pole with some heavy fog behind him that gives a wonderful blurred background to this photo.
But, sunshine is a photographers best friend when it comes to enhancing detail in your subjects. We have taken up fishing here, well I shouldn’t say we, husband has taken up fishing and I go along with my camera. Because birds and fishing go hand in hand. They like to be close to the people fishing just in case they can catch a free meal.
This allows me to have some great photo opportunities of these birds close up and personal.
Red Shouldered Hawk, I finally photographed a hawk. Well, I photographed one flying quite a while ago. Not sure what kind it was. But these two sat so nice for me as I was walking along the road underneath them.
At first I went out without my camera for my morning walk. Which I had told myself many times to not do that. So these two landed in a tree in front of me first when I did not have a camera. I continued my walk and they landed in another tree above me.
So I stopped and said, “Fine, I am going to go get my camera and you two better still be here when I get back. ” As I was saying it to them.
Usually they don’t do what I ask them to do, but this time they were still there. It is early morning so they have a warm glow to them from the sun just coming up and then to get a pair of them is quite a treat for me to add to my bird count.
My Favorite Bird of Birds, The Pelican. When in the south, one must go see the brown pelicans. Not only are they amazing to watch catching fish and landing on water. They can have a comical look to them as well, especially when they look right at you.
I was down by the water and these to characters were following me as I walked along the dock. They are looking for a hand out in the way of free fish. Which I did not have.
So I actually laid down on the dock and put my camera right above the water as they inched closer to see what it was. Which enabled me to get this nice photo of them at their level. I just love photographing these guys.
The Mocking Bird, I am not sure how they came up with this name. Except the fact this bird here is in a small tree outside of our camper every morning. I don’t always think to look in the tree when I take my dogs outside in the morning, but when I get to close this tree, it lets out a shriek of a sound that makes me jump every time.
I believe this tree is hers and she doesn’t like me getting to close, maybe just with the dogs. I took my camera out and stood right under her and took these photos and it kind of looks like she is eyeballing me.
Print Your Photos, as you may realize, I take a lot of photos, I mean a lot. But what do I do with all these photos you might ask. Well, besides sharing them with all of you here on blogging, I do sell photos across the internet on different websites.
Adobe photos is a great place to sell photos and a lot of my art work I create as well. Sometimes the photos go for less then a dollar and sometimes I get surprised when one sells for much more than a dollar. That is part of the fun, seeing the sales pop up.
But I don’t just put photos on the web, I do like to print some of my own to hang on the wall to be enjoyed by us everyday without having to look at the computer.
I print mine at the store called Walgreens, they do a very nice job and pretty cheap, I print some to go in frames but like this one below I printed it to a 30×17 and stuck it to a print board you can buy at any craft store. I hung this one in our RV.
My image sizes to print on average is 5500×3800 pixels with resolution of 300 px. For larger prints I use 6000 x 4145. There is an entire mathematical formula when trying to decide how to print your photos from the web. For example;
How to calculate image size – Quick summary
And that’s really all there is to it! To figure out the image size, just follow these simple steps:
1. Multiply the width and height of the image, in pixels, to get the total pixel count. 2. Multiply the total pixel count by 3 to get the image size in bytes. 3. Divide the number of bytes by 1024 to get the image size in kilobytes. 4. Divide the number of kilobytes by 1024 to get the image size in megabytes.
It can be confusing, but the new cameras take such high quality photos these days. One just has to print some out from what ever camera you have and see what results you get.
So I highly recommend everyone to print some of your own photos if you take them. Why let them just sit on the world wide web. Have fun with your photography.
Young Turkey Vulture, we are at a campground this weekend that has plenty of turkey vultures hanging about. Mainly because people feed the stray cats here and then these hungry birds come down from the trees and eat the left over cat food.
Nothing goes unnoticed by these birds, I even saw 3 young ones grab a empty bag of cat food off the top of a garbage can to see if there was anything left for them. Pretty smart 🙂
Update on this post, thank you to Andrew who left a comment on this post mentioning that this first photo of a turkey vulture could be a black turkey vulture and after looking it up, I agree. So I added this bird to my over all bird list bringing it up to 153 birds photographed. Thank you Andrew,
The Meadowlark, well I finally got a photo of this colorful bird. I didn’t think I was going to get a shot of one when we were out west. We were actually starting to head back east when I thought I had ran out of time to see one of these birds.
We stopped at a rest area and I heard this beautiful bird sound at the back of the rest area and low and behold it was this bird here. I went back in and grabbed my camera just as it was flying away and was able to get these few shots.
Red Bellied Sap Sucker, this colorful bird I photographed when I was out west. I have not taken many bird photos this past summer after we got home. We were to busy preparing for winter and just enjoying being home and not moving.
I can’t wait to start photographing wildlife again, I just haven’t seen much the last few weeks. A lot of beautiful landscapes for now.
Difference Between Bill & Beak – Not a thing—the words are synonymous. Ornithologists tend to use the word “bill” more often than “beak.” Some people use “beak” when referring to songbirds with pointed bills, and “bill” when discussing birds like ducks with more fleshy beaks. However, both words are used in reference to a wide variety of species.
They do serve an important purpose for each species from;
short thin bills for insect eaters,
short thick bills for seed eaters,
long thin bills can be for probing flowers for nectar or probing soft mud for worms and shellfish,
strong hooked bills for tearing meat.
Or they can be used to just goose the bird in front to get off the post.
Two New Birds – we went to a nature preserve in the state of Washington and I was able to photograph these two little beauties. Now I would love to be able to tell you what kind of birds they are. But I do not have my bird book in front of me and I wrote the names down in a notebook a while ago, but can’t find that.
So if anyone knows you can leave a comment below.
I have been taking videos of the birds at my feeder this month and these 3 are a family. The one in the middle is equivalent to a teenager and it kept trying to ask the other two to feed it. So I am going to say it is mom and pop, but they ignored junior and flew off to let him figure it out. You can see his reaction in the video. White Squirrel and Blue Jay
While I was filming the bird stand, this beautiful bird decided to take a break on my camera as it was filming the birds above.
I Found These Photos that I had not edited yet. I had shared a couple of them quite awhile ago but I found more as I was cleaning up some of my photo files. This bird is the Vermillion Fly Catcher and we saw this one at Big Bend National Park in Texas a few months ago.
Technology is sure nice when it comes to organizing all the photos that I take. But even with it, I lose track of some of them. Luckily one only has to enter a word in the search bar to find things I have forgotten about.
I have a video down below or you can click on this link to hear some bird sounds of two different places where I was videoing birds in their area.
Importance of Oil Rigs for Hummingbirds, I was doing some research about the migration of the Ruby Throated Hummingbird and found some new information I had not read before.
Ruby-throats do not travel in flocks during hummingbird migration. Instead, each bird follows its own instincts on appropriate departure times and routes.
Scientists believe that each hummingbird begins its migration in response to environmental triggers. One trigger is the changing level and angle of sunlight. Another trigger is believed to be a drop in available natural food. As these signals continue to activate, the hummingbird makes its preparations and eventually departs.
On their northward trip, most have reached Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula by February. In this lush jungle, they begin to feast on insects as they prepare for one of the toughest migrations for any bird. Each year, thousands of Ruby-throated Hummingbirds fly over the open water of the Gulf of Mexico rather than follow the longer shoreline route.
These brave little birds will fly non-stop up to 500 miles to reach U.S. shores. It takes approximately 18-22 hours to complete this amazing solitary flight.
Some hummingbirds aren’t strong enough, though, as many oil riggers and fishing boat crews can attest.
Every year, exhausted Ruby-throated Hummingbirds take temporary refuge on offshore oil rigs and boats floating in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico. These birds rest a while before bravely launching back into their flight across the open water.
When they return south, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds will follow the same daring migration route in reverse. They’ll charge up their energy reserves in the southern U.S. and then zip across the gulf toward their winter home. That’s two big, non-stop trips each year for Ruby-throats – you have to admire their tenacity!
How I Edit Bird Photos, these Ruby Throated Hummingbirds have been very active this past weekend. I have been sitting on my porch with my camera set on continuous high speed trying to get some good photos of these fast little birds in flight before they leave here and head south for the winter.
But because they are so fast, one can’t really get great compositions without doing a little post processing in the editing room.
So here are a couple of examples of how I crop a photo of these hummingbirds. The first photo is the original, the bird is off center and there are to many distractions with the wood post and the feeder to really see the bird itself.
I love the detail of its tail feathers in this shot, so I cropped everything out and brought up the exposure a bit because its body is in the shadow and now you can see a bit of its green color around the wings.
The sun is off to my right in these photos, so the bird is facing me and you can’t really see its beautiful throat colors without the sun shinning directly on them.
So again, I raised the exposure a bit in photoshop and used a vertical format for cropping to showcase the bird itself, now the one thing this composition is missing is its other wing. But, like I said they are so fast, we can’t see the wing movements to shoot at the exact time. Only high speed camera settings can do this and we can only take what we get.
If you notice the tail feathers are clear but the wings have a little motion blur, the average wing beat is around 53 beats per second and I have the camera set up at 1/4000 of a sec shutter speed.
It is so fun trying to get good shots of these beautiful little birds.
This photo below, I wasn’t sure I could isolate the bird from the feeder because it is so close to it. It is quite the challenge to photograph these birds flying away from you and to be able to see the tail feathers from the top like this photo.
Photoshop is a great tool for editing, along with light room. Again, I used a vertical format and really like the diamond shape light spot behind the bird. All these photos are taken with my camera set to 1/4000 sec shutter speed, f8, ISO 1200 and 600 mm lens.
The Rubies are Back, now I am still posting photos from our trip around the states from this last winter. But we are home now so I have to throw in some photos from here, like my favorite little Ruby Throated Hummingbirds that visit my flowers here every summer.
They are hard to photograph, they are constantly chasing each other.
On occasion I can find them sitting almost still on my garden fence. But the camera still has to be set at a very high shutter speed to get a glance at those wings that move so fast.
Songs and Sounds of Desert Birds, I just posted a video on my you tube channel highlighting all these wonderful birds and the sounds they make. The bird one hears the most is the White Winged Dove, but the most interesting one I think is the Gambel’s Quail.
Its the Simple Things that make me smile the most. Like this first photo, I did not have the camera prepared for this shot, but this little hummingbird showed up out of the blue and I just clicked away. Capturing a bit of light illuminating its beautiful colors.
Life can be a long bumpy road at times, but a journey worth taking, as it is a gift. The idea that any of us are here at all is worth thinking about. The true miracle of birth is something that I think about often, for I have never had children of my own. But, when you stop and remember how we are even here, that we all started from a tiny little cell.
Big Bend National Park, getting back to our travels through Texas. Now I had never even heard of Big Bend National park until this past winter when someone mentioned we should visit there as we drove along the southern border of Texas.
So we looked it up and made reservations for the first of March this past winter. One has to reserve early because this park is full all the time. We were able to book 11 days at their largest campground and I have to say the terrain of this part of Texas is just breathtaking.
Here is the link to my video if you want to see all the campgrounds that are available to use in this park and some of the wildlife and landscapes; Big Bend National Park
The largest campground is Rio Grande Village campground sitting at 1800 ft. elevation. So it get pretty warm down there even in March. We had a couple days in the 100 degrees and where we were at you can not use generators for your air conditioning. We had to go for a drive in the Jeep just to stay cool, but only a couple of days.
Then the highest elevation is Chisos Basin, a world onto itself. Completely different with lots of trees and green grass and much cooler temperatures sitting at 5400 ft. elevation.
Big Bend spans over 800,000 acres. I will be showing more of the beautiful landscapes in the next few post.
Wildlife at the campground consist of Javelinas, shown below. They would just wonder by all the campers munching on the grass.
One morning we woke to the sound of cows mooing, as a small heard was enjoying the green grass as well as they passed through the campground.
You can also find this little beauty of a bird here, the Vermillion Flycatcher, there were quite a few of them as the park would flood the center of the park, using water from the Rio Grande River. It kept the trees green and the grass, hence the wild life and birds enjoying this park as well.
A New Hummingbird From Washington, Well I finally photographed a new hummingbird. I have only ever seen one species of hummingbird and that is the Ruby Throated. We just happened across another nature preserve in Washington when we were there and found two new birds, no 3 new ones, including this hummingbird. Bird count is 152.
One of the feistiest hummingbird in North America. The brilliant orange male and the green-and-orange female Rufous Hummingbird are relentless attackers at flowers and feeders, going after (if not always defeating) even the large hummingbirds of the Southwest, which can be double their weight.
Rufous Hummingbirds are wide-ranging, and breed farther north than any other hummingbird. Look for them in spring in California, summer in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and fall in the Rocky Mountains as they make their annual circuit of the West.
Spring is in the Air, the sun shine really brings out the colors to some of our song birds. Where in the shade they may look like plain old black birds. But when the Sun shines, the vibrant colors do as well.
I think this one is checking out his toe nails, might be wanting a little pedicure. 🙂
