I’ve been finding it very difficult to get back to my New Mexico photos.  The excuse today was an absolutely gorgeous day with hardly a cloud in the sky.  I got out a little after noon and after striking out in the neighborhood I headed for March Point.  There I found the tide going out and the gulls hard at work making a living off of the mussels on the beach.  I watched them for two different periods of time.  I really enjoy the photography as it’s fun watching the gulls and it’s a little bit like shooting skeet.

(Here’s an unrelated photo jus so I can get a photo up on the top of this post.)  :  )

But to get on with what I learned today.  I saw several gulls dive into the water and come up with a mussel.  Gulls are naturally buoyant and normally can’t go underwater.  However I noticed several gulls diving from about 5-10′ and disappearing completely into the water, popping up only a couple of seconds later with a mussel in their mouth.  I thought the water was deeper, but judging by the gull’s buoyancy I doubt that the water was more than about 12″ deep.  The interesting part is that they could discern a mussel on the bottom, dive into the water and retrieve it.  I would guess they were successful about 70-80% of the time.  So here are a few of the photos of gulls flying, with all but one having a mussel in its mouth.

If you believe in reincarnation, coming back as a gull would seem to be a pretty good option.  They seem to make a living with relatively little effort, and while maybe not at the top of the list in terms of grace they sure aren’t far from the top!

And the final news.  Despite having photographed this activity (gulls gathering and eating muscles) previously, I had never managed to photograph a gull in the act of dropping a mussel on the rocks below.  It should be an easier photograph because the gulls always stall when they drop the mussel, giving the photographer a brief instant in the action to get a photo.  But for some reason I’ve had a very difficult time getting such a photograph.  My frustration ended today.  Although it’s not the best photograph, it’s good enough to post on the web site.

I had such a successful day last week photographing the male Anna’s hummingbird that I spent portions of following days (several hours all told) attempted to obtain more photographs.  Unfortunately the bird has decided to remain on his high perch and I haven’t once found him back down where those last photographs were taken.  However the activity has kept me in the neighborhood with my camera at the ready,.

On January 21 I happened on a large flock of Pine siskins in a what is apparently a Red alder tree growing in a wetland area.  I was able to park very close to the birds (which were often at my same level) and photograph them at will for 20-30 minutes from a very close distance.  Upon processing the photos at home I found I had taken 135 photographs… necessitating a lot of processing work.  I managed to cull those photographs down to 48 and I should probably take another cut at it.  Here are some of the best…

While I was exploring the neighborhood I drove to Cap Sante Marina to try to get photos of   a pair of Hooded mergansers and Red-breasted mergansers that were touring the marina.  While stalking those birds a Common loon stealthily surfaced very near me so I grabbed a couple of photos of it…

I’m still trying to get back to some of my New Mexico photos but it just hasn’t happened yet due to these local distractions!

My intention was to continue processing and posting photos from our visit to New Mexico early last November, but I hit a proverbial a’bump in the road’ on a local excursion yesterday (Jan 16,2015) and can’t wait to post some of the photos I obtained.  I’ll return to the New Mexico photos later.

The day began rather slowly with a trip around March Point with only photos of a Common goldeneye to show for my efforts.  I wasted a lot of time attempting to get closer to the bird but in the end the bird was smarter than I and I couldn’t obtain photos of the quality I would have liked.

I continued to Fir Island and things weren’t much better.  The main herd of Snow geese were in distant fields with no public access.  I did encounter a flock of Chestnut-backed chickadees feeding on either seed pods or insects in them at the Fir Island F&W HQ tract.

I continued off of Fir Island to Conway where I managed to coax a Lincoln’s sparrow out of some bushes but failed to obtain quality photographs.

I then drove down a back road towards Mount Vernon where I encountered several fields of swans, in the same areas and under similar conditions where I had found them the previous week.  (The swans are either Tundra or Trumpeter… I have difficulty telling the difference under the best of circumstances and am not even going to make an attempt with flying birds at these angles!)  A smaller group of swans were in one field and from time to time they would fly towards or past me.  The sun was behind me so I managed to get some nice photos.

I finally headed for home relatively late in the afternoon but decided to stop at the Cap Sante Overlook (in Anacortes) before calling it a day.  This was a fortunate decision.  The male Anna’s hummingbird, which I had seen on multiple prior visits to the area, had changed his location slightly and was now back on exactly the same blackberry branches he had been on last summer when he was defending a territory.  (He’s back at it again as I’ve seen a second hummingbird in the area!)  The light was behind me and I reasoned that I might be able to get some photos with his gorget reflecting in the light, so I sat patiently taking photos for a good while as he flew various forays around the area.

I’m going to digress a little from the subject of our local birds to highlight some photographs I took in early November, when I was having my Adobe Lightroom problems. These first photos were taken at the Randall Davey Audubon Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico.  I’ve found that location an excellent place to photograph birds, although their feeders, feeder contents, feeder locations, etc. leave a lot to be desired.

These first two photographs are of the Pink-sided race of Dark-eyed juncos, the most numerous birds at the Center.  The juncos there, as here with our Oregon race of juncos, seem to have significant variation in coloration.

On this particular trip I was able to photograph both a Stellar’s jay…

and a Western Scrub jay…

And one of my favorites from the Center is always the White-breasted nuthatch…

If you follow this blog you’ll know that I have had problems migrating from a PC to a Mac, especially as far as Adobe Lightroom is concerned.  I’m now hopeful that those problems are mostly behind me and that I can go back and post some of the photos I took early in the fall and start spending some time out in the field taking additional photos.  So here are some photos I took in the yard November 19, 2014 (pre-accipiter!).  If you didn’t see the raptor photos in the last post you might scroll down and take a peek.

Here are a few photos of Red crossbills.  I’m fairly certain this first one is a male…

This is where my identification skills get dicey… this may be a first-year male…

And I think this is a female…

This is a Red-breasted nuthatch, a common yard bird but one that’s often surprisingly difficult to photograph.

And finally, a couple of photos of an American robin.  The robins are another species that has virtually disappeared from the yard with the arrival of our accipiter.

I find it’s much more difficult to obtain really good photos in the winter months due to the lack of light.  I usually have to both lower my shutter speed and raise my ISO due to the lower light, and both adjustments are detrimental to obtaining really good photographs.  But we’re on the upswing now and every day brings a longer day and higher sun, so photographic conditions will gradually begin to improve.