It’s rare that you get that perfect day, where the birding is good and photo opportunities are bountiful. Some days you won’t see many birds, but there are some great photo opportunities that make up for it. Other days, you see lots of interesting birds, but they’re all camera shy, and good photo opportunities just don’t happen. Yesterday was one of the latter kinds of days. Good birding! Bad Photos!
It is an opportunity to show people what the vast majority of bird photos look like! If only every bird photo were crisp, in good light, with the bird clearly seen and in a good pose! It’s not an exaggeration to say that I throw out 95% of the photos that I take. Yesterday, there really weren’t any great long-term “keepers”, but below are some (bad) photos of some VERY interesting birds for the day.
A Blackburnian Warbler, a species you don’t see all that often here. Warblers in general are SO damn frustrating to try to photograph. This guy insisted on staying up towards the top of the canopy of some Burr Oaks. Since I see them so rarely, I still kept trying to get a “record” shot, but this is the best I could manage.
We are on the VERY northeastern edge of the breeding range of Blue-winged Warblers, and the only place they seem to reliably be found is at Newton Hills State Park. There were at least 3 in the area yesterday, singing away and squabbling among each other. They’d occasionally chase each other and get close, but the only shot I was able to get was this one.
American Golden Plovers are a nemesis bird for me. Most years, people are saying they’re seeing them all over…and I never see any. When I DO see some, they’re inevitably very far away and I can’t get any photos. Well, the good news is yesterday I 1) saw a large group of about 75, and 2) got some photos. The bad news…this is as good as I could get. They weren’t particularly shy, but were VERY careful to stay just out of camera range.
I birded 6 hours yesterday. In all that time, in all the photo tries, this is by far the best photo I was able to get. It’s about the ONLY photo I was able to get where the bird “fills the frame”, and is quite sharp. I could do without the thicket of sticks around him. But on a crappy photo day…I’ll take it.
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