Here’s the view from my boat today, the 50′ catamaran Freedom Seeker.
Needless to say, we’re having a wonderful time. We’ve been snorkeling and enjoying the sunshine here at Cooper Island all day, and we’re headed to Spanish Town on Virgin Gorda tomorrow.
(unrealiable WiFi means this is being posted the day after it was taken)
Adobe’s Lightroom 6 was released this week, bearing with it support for various new camera models including my Nikon D7200. What a relief! Nikon’s Capture NX-D software is terrible and slow, so despite some online purchasing difficulty with Adobe, everything is back up and running.
Thus, I’ve gone back through the last several weeks of D7200 photos with a culling and editing pass. I’m only partway through and have found a number of photos I’d passed over in Capture NX-D.
Female Red-breasted Nuthatch
I spent a short time this morning at Meadowbrook Park, a small wildlife sanctuary in the middle of a residential Seattle neighborhood. There were numerous house and song sparrows, Anna’s hummingbirds, a few various species of duck, red-winged blackbirds, and a couple of blue herons.
Didn’t get many pictures I particularly liked this morning, but made up for quantity with quality in two I’m very happy with.
Great blue heron headshot
Song sparrow close-up
Also: It’s less than two weeks until I’m in the British Virgin Islands on a 44′ sailing catamaran (that I’m the captain of!) and I couldn’t be more excited.
This morning a friend joined me on the hour-long drive down to Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge, a brackish wetlands habitat on the southern end of Puget Sound, just a few minutes north of Olympia on I-5. This federally-maintained wetlands is a major nesting site for birds of all kinds as well as a migration stop-off. Seeing as we’ve had a rather early-onset spring here on the West Coast, early March is seeing quite a few early arrivals. First-of-the-year rufous hummingbirds been being reported around northwest Washington for the past week and I saw one this morning at Nisqually (see later in this post for the photo proof!). We were joined not long after we started by a wonderful retired high-school teacher (44 years of teaching!) who we spent the entire hike conversing with.
The variety of birds we saw was impressive, and my pictures only reflect a small portion of them. It was also a very foggy morning: we arrived at just before 7:30am and didn’t start seeing direct sunshine until around 9:15! The fog unfortunately meant that photos were difficult. The fog was so thick that anything beyond about 10 meters was shrouded in fog, with the colors and sharpness of any picture muted toward gray and blurry.
Still, I managed to get some pictures I liked, and saw some really cool birds along the way.
Another sunny February morning here in Seattle, and the last day of February at that. An appointment this morning meant I couldn’t go far, so off I went to Discovery Park, on the north end this time. I was almost immediately greeted by a number of dark-eyed juncos and American robins browsing nearby, and even several Bewick’s wrens singing.
Dark-eyed junco