Shoot!

Spring migration continues to bring both delight and frustration. This week, I got some wonderful first-of-season birds--but failed to get any pictures of them. Glenn gave me one of his not-so-old SLR cameras and bought a me a new 300 mm lens for Christmas, just so I could get decent documentary shots of birds on the days when he was sleeping in or off shooting something else. But a combination of pathologically slow reflexes and Luddite tendencies (instruction manual? What's that?) meant that my photos of that gorgeous Lazuli Bunting and Hermit Warbler hopping about in THE SAME BUSH AT THE SAME TIME at Canyon Park last Sunday morning turned out as indecipherable blurs. If you saw them, you wouldn't even be able to tell what kind of bush they were sitting in.

Grrr. I hate being incompetent.

The only somewhat recognizable shot I got all weekend was a pair of Downy Woodpeckers just moments after they mated (I wasn't fast enough to get them in the act, so no bird porn!) This was taken by the island at Huntington Central Park on Saturday morning:


(Here, I could insert a totally tasteless joke about getting a woody. But I won't.)

I also got a horrible blurry photo of the American Redstart at Huntington Central: as usual, he was in a cluster of bushes not far from the Slater Street parking lot.


Luckily, Glenn's photos from the weekend came out great, as usual. We spent a lot of time admiring a very noisy Bullock's Oriole at the Shipley Nature Center on Saturday:


The Black-chinned Hummingbirds are back at Huntington Central Park, and Glenn spent a lot of time shooting them while I trolled the rest of the park for warblers and other goodies:


Yup, he a million times the photographer I am. But I can still spell better than him. And cook better. And I'm better at math, too.

So there.