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.