Showcasing the beauty of Mother Nature
Saturday was quite the day for bird sightings while out on my morning walk with the dog. I haven’t had a chance to do much editing, but since I also haven’t been terribly consistent with posting, I thought I should do a quick post showing a sample of the birds I saw on the weekend, and hopefully I will have a chance to highlight each sighting later in the week.
I had some lovely photo opportunities yesterday while out walking with the dog, both of the heron that I posted earlier, and of this beautiful bird. I have tried to determine what type it is, and think that it could be one of several different types of hawks. But while looking through birding websites and photos, I realized that photos I posted earlier, of what I thought to be a cooper’s hawk, may in fact have been a juvenile northern harrier. Regardless of what we call them, they are wonderful to watch. Maybe one of these days, I will see them under blue skies rather than the stark grey we had yesterday. At least it waited to rain until after I got in the car!
Update: I ran into a lovely couple from the Alouette Field Naturalists group, and they took a look at these photos and told me this is an Osprey. They had been watching an Osprey rebuilding a nest that had been taken over by a Canada goose.
On our drive to the dikes this morning, we had a great blue heron take off from the side of the road, and fly straight towards the car. I braked hard (luckily it was early and there was no one else on the road) and the heron decided to change direction at the last possible moment, so thankfully, no casualties today 🙂 It’s amazing to see them up close though, and be able to see how big their wingspan is.
I am glad I grabbed my camera bag on the way out the door, as I had some great bird sightings today. I only managed a few shots of the heron, but I have lots more photos to go through for future posts.
Spencer was enjoying the sunny weather on the weekend – it’s been the first time this year that we have had any porch time.
The amazing acrobatic abilities of the hummingbird!
Continuing on with the hummingbirds!
The photos I have of the male rufous hummingbird in flight (so far!) are not as sharp as I would like, but this one of him paused at the feeder highlights his beautiful colouring.
He didn’t stay long as the female kept coming around and chasing him off!
1/500 sec, f5.6, ISO1250
I was so happy to see my first hummingbirds of the year this past weekend, and was able to spend some time relaxing on my parent’s porch, camera at the ready to capture a few shots. I’m quite pleased with the results, so there just might be a hummingbird of the day around here for the next little while 🙂
1/200 sec, f5.6, ISO 100 with speed light
1/200 left significant motion blur of the wings, and with the light, the fastest I tried was 1/640, and that didn’t even come close to freezing the wing motion.
The long grass was doing nothing to enhance the photo, and the Jackass penguin has only a limited amount of pale pink colouring around the eyes, so I decided to do a black and white conversion. After a hectic day, unwinding with some editing seemed like a good choice, and the penguin made me smile. Mission accomplished 🙂
1/320sec, f5.6, ISO200 – conversion in Silver Efex
Penguin at Boulder Beach, Cape Town, South Africa, March 2013.
Sometimes, I make poor decisions. Okay, oftentimes I make poor decisions. But today, the decision to leave my camera at home really pissed me off.
I’ve not had much success photographing bald eagles. The closest I came was last summer, but it came out of nowhere and my shutter speed was a bit too slow. The last three times I have seen bald eagles, my camera was safely packed in the well cushioned case… at home. Once was a juvenile bald eagle with a rainbow in the background, the second was a single mature eagle chasing a Cooper’s Hawk, and today, two mature bald eagles perched in a tree, scanning the river. As I was walking with Spencer this morning, a Cooper’s Hawk flew in front of me at head height and as I scanned to follow it, spotted the pair of eagles.
Hence the SLOW (or is it WOLS?) photo. Hopefully this time I have finally learned, and the next time I think it is too damp to bother taking my camera with me when I walk the dog, I will grab it anyways.
This was the best my phone could manage of the last couple of eagle sightings. Big, sad sigh.
