I was at the Post Office yesterday and noticed that they have a ‘forever’ stamp series based on songbirds. So those of you who consider yourself birders and enjoy advocating for them can now use forever stamps with pictures of songbirds. And since the stamps are good for first-class postage forever, you should avail yourself of several sheets (20/sheet).

About 3pm on September 26, 2014 I had an amazing experience… maybe my best of what has been a very nice, extended summer of birding in the yard. Since my morning walk in Washington Park had been rained out, I was considering taking a makeup walk in the middle of the afternoon. As I was tidying up the kitchen in preparation for leaving, I glanced out the window towards the watercourse and was surprised to see American robins all over the yard and the water features. I estimate that there were at least a dozen in the yard, but the actual number could easily have been twice that. I realized that there might be a Varied thrush among them and so started watching a little more intently. It was difficult observation… the robins and many other species of birds were moving all around the yard, trees and water features. There was no Varied thrush among them but I saw something even better… a Swainson’s thrush. How can it be ‘better’? If the past is any indication, the Varied thrushes will eventually be coming down from the mountains and will visit our yard daily for several months this winter. The Swainson’s thrush is a much rarer visitor to our yard and will migrate south for the winter so we won’t have even a possibility of another sighting until spring.

The activity in the yard was like a scene in Alfred Hitchcock’s, The Birds. In the space of about 15 minutes I saw:
• 2 Brown creepers
• 2 Yellow-rumped warblers (Make that three Yellow-rumped warblers. In addition to the two pale (probably first-year females I observed in the yard, while I was writing this I just spotted a male Audubon’s Yellow-rumped warbler still in breeding plumage!)
• A pale female Western tanager (which I thought was long-gone!)
• At least one Spotted towhee
• Our first Golden-crowned sparrow returning for the winter season
• A Song sparrow, an as of late very rare visitor since our previous winter resident(s) left in the spring
• And the usual cast of Chestnut-backed and Black-capped chickadees, House sparrows, and House finches.

After about fifteen minutes there was some abatement of the activity, but unfortunately one of the Yellow-rumped warblers flew into the window right in front of me and spiraled to the ground below. I knew my presence in the yard would result in the birds leaving, but I wanted to do what I could for the warbler. It was conscious and I reached down and lifted it off the ground, at which time it made a rapid recovery and flew 30-40’ across the yard. It wasn’t a great flight but at that point I felt that it would survive.

So for the past couple of weeks I had thought that my photographic activities in the yard were winding down, but if it doesn’t rain tomorrow I think I’m going to have to be back out in the yard for a while!

Sorry… no photos. And this is my first posting in a couple of weeks. I’ve apparently successfully copied my photos from the 1T internal hard drive on my laptop to a new external 2T drive. I have a few photos from the yard, from an excursion out into the county and I also took a four-day trip to Winthrop which generated a considerable number of photos. Due to the overhead associated with the image transfer I didn’t process images for a few days, and by the time I got up the courage to download to the external hard drive I had accumulated over 470 images that I’m still trying to process! So I do have some new photos and I’ll try to post some photos before too long.

DON’T FORGET THE SONGBIRD STAMPS available at the US Postal Service!

I’ve borrowed the title of one of my favorite Bob Dylan’s songs for the title of this blog. There are changes in the air and I’m getting ready to place them before you.

The first change is that we are probably experiencing our last few days of summer-like weather and it’s changing the conditions under which I take photographs in the yard. The best light for photography is changing almost daily.  Just a few short weeks ago there were just a couple of periods in the day when I did NOT have good light on the yard and watercourse.  The conditions have now reversed and there are just a few times a day when I DO have good lighting conditions.  The sun is quickly sinking lower in the sky, and as it falls along the ridge of the large fir trees to our south the yard becomes a patchwork of light and dark which changes from minute to minute and, with the clear skies we have been having lately, adds a high propensity for backlit subjects.

So it has become time for me, for the first time in several months, to switch my base of operations from the yard to the greater county.  My first fall excursion occurred on Wednesday (9/10/2014).  My first good photographic find occurred just north of Fir Island when, with the help of a little pishing, I discovered a Black-capped chickadee and at least FOUR Bewick’s wrens… and those birds are the ones pictured in this blog.

Of note was a Spotted sandpiper at the boat launch on the HQ tract on Fir Island and a large number of Lark sparrows along a ditch in the vicinity of Dodge Valley Road.  While I did obtain photographs, they were not good enough to post here.

The second change you should see is new banners at the top of some of my pages.  I’ve been remiss in not changing those for several months and since I was out on a mini expedition I took the opportunity to take some pictures of the local flora.

The final change that’s occurring is a technical one in which most of you won’t be interested, but since it’s occupying a considerable amount of my time and attention and is of considerable importance to this blog, I’m laying it out anyway.  I’ve just about reached the capacity (1T) of my internal hard drive.  Up until now I have been able to store ALL of  my photos on my laptop’s internal hard drive, but that is coming to an end.  I could have purchased a 2T internal hard drive but for various reasons too technical to get bogged down in here I’ve decided to move ALL my photographs to a 2T external hard drive.  I’ve successfully copied all my photographs (64,627 images @ 575GB!) to a new external hard drive and now I need to figure how to link Adobe Lightroom’s catalog to the photographs in the new location.  That last step is still pending!

As fall progresses I’ll be switching more of my photography to vehicle excursions and I probably won’t get as many really good photographs as I manage in the more controlled/favorable conditions in my yard.  In addition to the photos I’ve displayed in this blog, I’ve already added more to the hopper but first want to wait for all the technical matters to be resolved before I process any more photos.  But I think you’ll enjoy what you see in my next blog.

With regard to the seasonal changes mentioned in this blog I would like to draw your attention to some appropriate music for the occasion.  Two of my favorite folk songs address the changes of the seasons that we’re experiencing… the song, Changes, sung by Gordon Lightfoot/Phil Ochs (not together) and Simon and Garfunkle’s song, Leaves that are Green.  Happy autumn!

The good weather continues as do my bird sightings in the yard.  I spent the major part of Sunday afternoon in the yard and was rewarded with multiple sightings of three different species of warblers (Townsend’s, Yellow-rumped and Orange-crowned) as well as multiple visits from Red crossbills.

One or more Townsend’s warblers made two extended, widely separated visits to the yard.  One occurred just after I began observing shortly after noon and the other in the middle of the afternoon shortly after returning to the yard from my second nap of the day!  I was able to take many, many good photos of the warbler(s).  These sightings bring the number to three for the year, and that’s three times the number of sightings we’ve had in any other year.

We also had visits from one or more Orange-crowned warblers…

and visits from at least two Yellow-rumped warblers.

The Red crossbills were also active with visits from one or more males and one or more juveniles.

If you didn’t see my last blog post regarding four different species of warblers in the yard in the same day, be sure and page back to see the commentary and photos.

Our weather has been spectacular for the last couple of days and I’ve spent considerable time in the yard hoping for more warblers or other fall visitors, although I can be honest with you and tell you that I have no hopes of having another four-species warbler day. Things are rapidly changing here in the yard and I’m quickly losing light on my watercourse during significant periods of the day.  The sun is dipping lower on the horizon and tall fir trees in the City parkland to the south are casting significant shadows over the entire yard, including my two primary staging trees.  Added to the problem is the bright sun itself, because often the areas behind my prime birding areas are brightly lit and the birding areas are in shadows which results in backlit subjects.

On Friday afternoon I was sitting under a perfectly clear sky, trying to photograph a juvenile American robin that was attempting to sneak into the watercourse on the ground from the back side.  As I concentrated on seeing if the bird would enter a small area of sunlight I was surprised by a shadow passing over the yard.  I quickly looked up and saw a Red-tailed hawk, probably the one I had misidentified about a month ago, circling in the sky overhead at just about the optimal distance for some good photos.  (I know… where is its red tail?  That’s part of the reason I originally misidentified it!)  Unfortunately, by the time I could bring my camera to bear the hawk had soared away.  But I quickly made adjustments to my camera and lens for aerial photography.  (This involves restricting the auto-focus lens distance to greater than about 20′ for faster acquisition and focusing, changing my shutter speed to about 1/1000 of a second and changing the camera’s focus to continuous mode for purposes of tracking a moving target.)

So now I was ready but there was no hawk! I waited four or five minutes and then saw the hawk overhead, BUT it was now at least twice the height it had been when I originally saw it.  Bummer!  But this didn’t stop me from taking about 50 photos as it soared overhead.  So here are a few of the photos… but first, another technical explanation of the photography involved.

All of the photos of the hawk you see below have been drastically enlarged.  I had hoped to show you an original photo that had not been enlarged, but read onl   Using my Adobe Lightroom software I cropped the original photo which has the effect of enlarging it.  But when I do that I’m throwing away maybe 90% or more of the 24mp I have available, so I lose detail in the portion of the image I retain.  So while I think these photos are interesting, they can’t be enlarged like many of the photos I take.  And that, friends, is the advantage to birding photography (where the subject matter generally only occupies a relatively small percentage of the photograph) of having a camera sensor with a large number of pixels.  (I had one or two English teachers who probably would have flunked me over that last sentence, but I found it reads better with parentheses than with commas!)

So with all that technical explanation behind us, here is the unenlarged photo…  Whoops… after all that explanation I just discovered that the original photo exceeds my blog site’s size regulations, so I can’t show you the amazing enlargement of which today’s technology is capable.  If you wish you can email me and I’ll send you both photos as an enclosure in the email.  Sorry…!

So with my presumed success photographing the Red-tailed hawk and with activity in the yard dreadfully slow, I decided to hone my skeet prowess even further by traveling a couple of blocks to the edge of the island and shooting cormorants returning to their roosts after their day spent fishing in Fidalgo Bay.  Here are a couple of results…

But I don’t want to slight the pair of Red crossbills that did make the effort to effect an appearance in the yard.  It was under less than perfect lighting conditions but that wasn’t their fault!  In this photo we have a male in the foreground and a juvenile in the shadow.  (Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain that House finch lurking in the background!)

I tallied four different warbler species on Wednesday (9/3/2014), and all were in our yard!

The first warbler to visit was a Yellow-rumped Audubon warbler and I saw it sometime around noon when I first occupied my usual position in the yard.  Unfortunately I didn’t have good light at any of the areas that the warbler visited, but I made the most of the situation.

My next visitor was a Black-throated Gray warbler, a warbler that wasn’t even on my radar until about a month ago.  For awhile I had visits from one almost every day, but it’s been about three weeks since I saw my last one.  This one showed up late in the afternoon, after I had lost most of the light.

Again, late in the afternoon I had a visit from an Orange-crowned warbler.  This has been the most common warbler visitor over the past month or so and I’ve had at least one visit every day with at least one occasion with two in the watercourse at the same time.  I’ve got better photos, but I wanted to include photos I took on this date and some of the bird’s poses were cute.

Finally, just about the time I was ready to call it a day, I got a quick glimpse of a warbler flitting behind the leaves of one of the madrona trees.  I knew immediately it was a Townsend’s warbler, and after a little hide and seek it emerged on a limb in full sun!  What a spectacular sight!  This was my first positive sighting this year… in past years I’ve only had a single sighting and it’s always been in the fall.

I hung it up at 5:30pm with four different species of warblers observed, and photographed, in our yard!