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Birding on a warm, sunny January day in Seattle

As usual, the weather forecast for Seattle wasn’t quite right. Today, though, it was much more pessimistic than needed: it’s been above 50°F all morning, and only partly cloudy since about 9:15 am this morning.

A perfect morning for some birding in Discovery Park! Very few people around, fewer than you’d expect for a morning like this, but I suppose a lot of people trusted the weather forecast a bit too much, because even the Ballard Farmers’ Market wasn’t nearly as crowded as it usually is on such beautiful days. I took 380 photos in about an hour and a half, mostly due to burst-fire. As you’ll see, most of the birds I found this morning were busy bathing and preening, so burst-fire mode is very useful for catching interesting (and sudden) behavior.

When I arrived it was still overcast, so the lighting wasn’t great. I quickly found an Anna’s hummingbird, though I couldn’t get close enough to get a shot, and saw a red-tailed hawk from a distance flying out of the park. But then, a fun bird to find (and rather shy): a red-breasted sapsucker. Quite a few robins, starlings, and even a Stellar’s jay were in the tree as well. Though I located it by the sounds of its tapping, it soon started to scratch its face on a branch and then begin preening:

Red-breasted Sapsucker

Red-breasted Sapsucker

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2014 Photo Year-in-Review: My Favorite Shots

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I’ve gone through my past year of shots in Lightroom, picked out my favorites, and present them here with brief descriptions of where and how I got them.

February 3rd

A bold Downy Woodpecker gets close. Washington Park Arboretum, February 3rd 2014

A bold downy woodpecker gets close. Washington Park Arboretum, February 3rd 2014. ISO 1600 (auto), 400mm, f/8.0, 1/500s

I’d just finished a rather unlucky birding session in the Arboretum when I noticed a small bird climbing around on a low-hanging branch. I carefully circled around the tree to be able to catch the bird in the morning sunlight and sure enough, it not only circled the branch, but climbed toward me a bit closer as well. I liked this shot so much I made it the first photo I had printed onto canvas, and it’s hanging in my kitchen. This is a downy woodpecker, the first of about 4 that I saw in 2014.

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2014 Photo Year-in-Review: Equipment

(Don’t bother reading this post unless you’re interested in the equipment side of photography, you’ll be bored)

Within a week of the beginning of 2014 I bought my first super-telephoto lens: the Sigma 120-400mm f/4.5-5.6. After renting large primes (notably, the Nikon 300mm VR and VRII, ~$3000 and ~$5500 lenses, respectively) from Glazers, a local camera equipment and rental business here in Seattle, I decided it would be worth my while to buy something with significant reach for myself. While those Nikon lenses were way out of my budget (not just the primes, zooms as well), I was able able to pick up the Sigma for about $900. An expensive bit of kit, no doubt, but comparatively reasonable.

Something like 90-95% of the shots I took during 2014 were with this lens, and I’ve been very pleased with the results. As I tell people, “you need a big lens for little birds.” While I feel I’m ready for an upgrade, I’m still able to consistently get great results, and I’ll be keeping this lens around as a backup for a while.

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Chasing rare birds

Today I did something I hadn’t done before; rather than go to a place I knew to be good for general birding, I chased down some rare bird sightings, to mixed success. Being fairly new to all this I had only just found out about a mailing list for regional bird sightings. A few days ago the Seattle Audubon Society had posted about a snowy owl who’d showed up in Edmonds, WA. Using the mailing list I was able to narrow my search to the marina park, to which I arrived about 30 minutes after sunrise on this cold (~25°F) morning.

Unfortunately, the owl was nowhere to be found. I knew it was a long shot, as it hadn’t been seen since Friday (two days ago), but a number of other birders had taken the same gamble. Nobody had seen the owl. Still, there were some interesting species to be found, including a large and hungry flock of pine siskin:

A male pine siskin forages for seeds

A male pine siskin forages for seeds

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The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

(post title blatantly stolen from Richard Feynman’s book of the same name)

During the gray cloudy months that constitute winter here in Seattle (or really, the Northwest in general), I find it both therapeutic and useful to do a lot of research on places I plan to go in the next year or two. Useful because there are a lot of things good to know before I go; therapeutic because learning new things about places I plan on going is some of the best daydreaming fuel there is.

If you’re not already familiar with it, WikiTravel is a really good source for travel research. It’s not as refined as Wikipedia (particularly if you’re looking at less-traveled-by-Western-travelers type places, there are a lot of empty stub articles) but there’s a lot of useful information and links that would never show up on Wikipedia, and it’s organized in a way that makes more sense for travelers than for someone simply looking for general information. Today I was looking at the entry for Belize, as I’m currently leaning toward my winter 2016 charter sailing trip being there. Rather than the sailing and coastal information I normally look at though, I decided to see what I (and my friends) would be able to see if we took a few days of time on land before we started the sailing trip.

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