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Birds (and more) from a brief trip to the Dominican Republic

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In early June I flew to Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, for a friend’s wedding at a resort on the coast north of the city. Naturally, despite the limited time there and the schedule for the wedding, I made some time for some bird photography, with little regard for the amount of photography equipment I had to haul along with me.

At the resort there was a small eco-park, which was well populated by native, wild birds. These birds being accustomed to human presence, getting these photos was not especially challenging, but it was certainly fun!

Click on the photos if you want to view them in fullscreen (and use the arrow keys to move through them).

Antillean mangos were around if you paid attention, but there weren’t all that many flowering plants around, so I only saw a few:

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Hummingbird overload at Discovery Park

This past weekend (June 13th & 14th) I spent each morning at Discovery Park, arriving before 7am each day to coincide with the peak of activity by small birds. Specifically, I went looking for rufous hummingbirds before they begin migrating south to Mexico in the next two months.

What ended up happening (after a nice person in the park told me where he’d seen dozens of hummingbirds buzzing about) was probably the two best days of hummingbird photography I’ve had yet. More importantly, it gave me a lot of practice shooting these tiny, fast creatures, as well as an idea on an equipment modification I could make that I’m going to have to try to fabricate (possibly with the help of a 3D printer) which, if I end up doing, I’ll detail in a future blog post.

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Oh Lightroom, how I’ve missed you

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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

Female Red-breasted Nuthatch

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Meadowbrook Pond, Seattle

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

Great blue heron headshot

Song sparrow close-up

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.

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A foggy morning at Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge

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.

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