Tag: Birding

Whatever Weds.-This & That

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Copyright ©2024 Deborah M. Zajac. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.

What a week it’s been! It all started on October 10th, 2024.

My neighbor and I rose early to head up to Emerald Bay for sunrise.

The color was earlier than we hoped so, we made a quick stop at Pope Beach to shoot the color and daybreak.

©Deborah M. Zajac | http//circadianreflections.com Image

Then we made our way up to a lookout over Emerald Bay to photograph the lake.

©Deborah M. Zajac | http//circadianreflections.com Image

Then we took our time making stops along the way home to photograph some Autumn Color.

©Deborah M. Zajac | http//circadianreflections.com Image

We saw a beautiful Red-tailed Hawk hunting for breakfast. She caught a Vole but, I won’t gross you out with those images.

©Deborah M. Zajac | http//circadianreflections.com Image

Later that evening I saw the Northern Lights for the first time ever. That post is here. It was glorious.

Friday morning I birded with my usual birding group and we had a great morning seeing 40 species of birds. Along with the birds I noticed some spooky Zombie Pirates lurking by the pond. Here’s one.

©Deborah M. Zajac | http//circadianreflections.com Image

Saturday morning I was up early and met up with two girl friends to do my first Big Day. It’s a 24 hour global birding marathon put on by Cornell Lab of Ornithology. We didn’t sign up as team or register our day but we, birded from 8AM until after 4PM. I saw 45 species. It was pretty fun day. We posted our sightings on ebird.org so they’ll have our record for their counts and information. Unfortunately, the next afternoon I got sick, and shortly afterwards I was hearing from my companions from the day before that they where also sick. We think the deli we stopped at to have lunch is where we picked up food poisoning. I brought home half my sandwich which I shared with He-Man and yep, he got it too. UGH.

Monday still weak, and very tired I was determined to locate and see Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) but, I wasn’t in shape to drive anywhere so I just stepped out on my back patio and photographed it there. It’s so cool and it has a great long tail!

©Deborah M. Zajac | http//circadianreflections.com Image

What a week! What a month it’s been so far! The Aurora, and the Comet really made my month. Everything else has been icing on the cake.

My tummy is still sketchy, but I’m on the mend and so are He-Man and my friends. I plan to be out photographing Halloween things, birding, and maybe the Comet with a better composition soon. I hope your week is going well. Oh, and watch out for the Zombies and Ghoulies! 👻

Nikon D850| Nikkor 500mm, &35mm| PS CC

more to come…

Friday’s Feathered Friends- Warblers

Posted in birding, Nikon, PhotographyTagged , , , , , , , , 48 Comments

Copyright ©2024 Deborah M. Zajac. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.

For Mother’s Day and my birthday He-Man and I went to Ohio for several days of birding the Spring migration of Eastern birds. It was fantastic. I added 27 new birds to my life list most of which were Warblers.

Here are three that I have processed.

Magnolia Warbler, female
Black-throated Blue, male
Chestnut-sided Warbler, male.

My favorite Warbler seen was the Chestnut-sided. Isn’t he gorgeous.

I have thousands of images to cull and sort through so I’ll be dribbling out the images over the next several weeks.

It was a great trip. I hope I get an opportunity to return as there are Warblers, and other birds I still hope to see.

Have a great week-end everyone.

Nikon D850| Nikkor 500mm PF-e

more to come…

Whatever Weds. Eclipse

Posted in Birding in Nevada, Nikon, Sun, Wide Field Astro-photographyTagged , , , , , , 55 Comments

Copyright ©2024 Deborah M. Zajac. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 

PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.

I wasn’t in the path of Totality for the eclipse on Monday but, I did watch the it from my patio. The Partial we saw covered 47% of the Sun’s face.

He-Man, myself, and a neighbor enjoyed the birds singing, and watching golfers play through without ever looking up to see what was happening in the sky above us.

I made an image of the full sun first before the eclipse started.

Sun, April 8, 2024

The large sunspot is 3628, and the smaller one is 3633.

This image below is a 5 frame composite showing the sequence of the partial eclipse from shortly after the beginning to the end with the Maximum coverage image in the middle.

Image-5 Frame Composite

The dark shadows you see on the face of the images of the sun are clouds that were rolling across the Sun/Moon during the eclipse.

Now that eclipse madness has passed and it’s sunny, the snow has melted here in the valley and our lawn has turned green I’m ready to turn my attention to looking for spring flowers and more birds.

Speaking of birds. I got a “lifer pair” last Friday. A pair of Red Crossbills.

They were a bit out of range for my lens but, I did get an image that positively identified them. It’s noisy and soft, but it’s a keeper.

Red Crossbill Pair

This is the female with her wings spread ready to fly, and her mate in the back. I was doing my happy dance when I got a positive ID on these two.

So, did you see the eclipse in partial or in Totality? Wasn’t it cool!

Happy Wednesday!

Nikon D850|Nikkor 500mm PF-e| Orion Glass Solar Filter| PS CC 25.5.1

more to come…

Friday’s Feathered Friends-Golden-crowned Sparrow

Posted in Birding in Nevada, Friday's Feathered Friends, Nikon, PhotographyTagged , , , , , , , , , 49 Comments

Copyright ©2024 Deborah M. Zajac. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 

PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.

I last shared this Sparrow in 2015. I don’t see many of them and I only see them during the Winter migration hanging out with the White-crowned Sparrows, but sadly, never at my feeder. Last week I saw this one.

Male Golden-crowned Sparrow

He was pretty skittish. Every time I tried getting closer he flew further away so these are pretty well cropped.

Fun Facts:

    • This sparrow is one of the least known of our songbirds, particularly on its northern breeding grounds. It has been the subject of only a few laboratory and field studies, so most of what we know about it comes from scattered notes in scientific journals.
    • Miners in the Yukon at the turn of the twentieth century woefully referred to the Golden-crowned Sparrow as the “no gold here” bird, because its song resembled that depressing phrase. They also interpreted its song to say “I’m so tired,” prompting them to dub the bird “Weary Willie.”
    • The Golden-crowned Sparrow arrives earlier and stays longer on its California wintering grounds than almost any other bird species.
    • When day length increases in the spring, the Golden-crowned Sparrow detects the change through photoreceptors (light-sensitive cells). Its body responds by putting on fat and getting an urge to migrate.
    • The oldest Golden-crowned Sparrow on record was at least 10 years, 6 months old. It was caught by a bird bander in California in 1970 and released.

Fun facts gleaned from allaboutbirds.org

I hope you all have a great week-end!

Nikon D810| Nikkor 500mm PF-e| PS CC 25.3.1

more to come…

Whatever Weds. Yellowlegs

Posted in Birding in Nevada, Nature, NikonTagged , , , , , , 46 Comments

Copyright ©2023 Deborah M. Zajac. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 

PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.

I saw this one foraging in a shallow pond earlier in the month. I think it’s a Lesser Yellowlegs, but if I’m wrong let me know! It’s so hard to tell it apart from the Greater Yellowlegs. I’m going on the bill not being too much longer than its head.

I don’t see this type of bird too often so it’s pretty neat when I do. It’s either passing through or hanging out for winter migration.

Yellowlegs

Fun Facts:

    • Despite their very similar appearance, Greater and Lesser Yellowlegs are not each other’s closest relatives. Lesser Yellowlegs is more closely related to the much larger Willet.
    • Lesser Yellowlegs are known for their steadfast defense of their eggs and chicks. Biologist William Rowan once noted, “they will be perched there as though the safety of the entire universe depended on the amount of noise they made.”
    • Both the male and female Lesser Yellowlegs provide parental care to the young, but the female tends to leave the breeding area before the chicks can fly, thus leaving the male to defend the young until fledging.
    • The Lesser Yellowlegs saw significant declines due to market hunting for the fashion trade. The species’ tendency to return and hover above wounded flock mates made them easy targets. Populations rebounded when market hunting was banned in the U.S and Canada in the early 20th century.
    • The oldest recorded Lesser Yellowlegs was at least 4 years, 11 months old when it was found in South Dakota in 1965. It had been banded in the Lesser Antilles in 1960.

more to come…

Sunday Stillness: Yellow Rumped Warbler + 1

Posted in Bird Photography, Birding in Nevada, Nikon, PhotographyTagged , , , , , , 56 Comments

Copyright ©2023 Deborah M. Zajac. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. 

PLEASE DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION.

Plus 1:

It’s out of my wheelhouse to promote other’s work, but I’m so excited I’m sharing a book and author this week.

Several months back Dan Antion of https://nofacilities.com/2023/09/20/introducing-rascal-todd/

had a give-away of his soon to be published 4th novel and I won it!

The book was released last Wednesday and I received my copy. I’m so excited to read this 4th book that goes along with his first three books in his Dreamer’s Alliance series, but this fourth book is also a “stand alone” book. The series is terrific. I’m so glad we get to meet new characters and follow some of the original characters in the new book whom I didn’t want to say good-bye to. You know how that goes when you really like the book right? 😀

What I’ll be reading next week:

Image used with permission from Dan Antion

Have a lovely Sunday, and great week everyone!

Nikon D810| Nikkor 500mm PF-e | PS CC 24.6.0

more to come...

Whatever Weds. Birding with Friends

Posted in Bird Photogaphy, California Wildlife Reserves, Photography, Whatever WednesdayTagged , , , , , , , , 76 Comments

Copyright ©2023 Deborah M. Zajac. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. DO NOT USE MY IMAGES WITHOUT EXPRESSED WRITTEN PERMISSION!

After having to postpone a trip to California to do some birding with friends 2 times due to weather I was finally able to cross the mountains and make that meetup last weekend.

We had a lovely day weather wise. It was sunny, not windy, and thankfully not muddy from all the rain and flooding the area had had.

On my way to meet the group I stopped at a refuge along the way just after daybreak to see if there were birds on the pond. There were hardly any but, oh, it was pretty.

Colusa National Wildlife Refuge Platform pond.

I wanted to drive the auto route to see what birds were in the other ponds but, every thing beyond the platform pond was closed due to flooding. I hung around for a bit hoping some more birds would fly in, but the birds that were flying overhead kept on flying…I wondered where they were headed since it wasn’t this lovely pond they were headed for? What was wrong with this pond?!!

I left to meet up with my friends at Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge just up the road about 20 miles.

I took just over 700 hundred images but, after my first culling I have a smidge over 200 keepers, and quite a few of those are duplicates that will require a second culling to really hone it down and free up much needed disk space. That second culling is so hard. Do you find it as hard as I do to let go of those? I feel like I need those as back up images! It’s nuts I know especially as I have a two fold backup system in place for my images and yet…it’s so hard to let some of those duplicates go!

I’ve only processed two of my images so far. The top image in this post and this Red-Shouldered Hawk. I had to work so hard for its image. I was driving around the auto-route and this bird was on the passenger side of the road way up high at the top of this dead snag. I couldn’t see it from my seat. I had to reposition my car kinda kaddy wompass, and hope no one else came up behind me while Gordon a fellow blogger from https://undiscoverdimagesamongstus.wordpress.com/who was in the back seat and I photographed this bird.

I have a console between bucket seats in the front so I wasn’t able to slide over to get my camera out the window. Lemme tell ya this wasn’t an easy shot. I wanted to be where Gordon was… in the back seat just then. 😀 It was worth the effort though. Isn’t it handsome! fyi- We’re not allowed outside of our cars while on the auto-route. There are a few spots where we are but this spot wasn’t one of those.


Red-Shouldered Hawk

I don’t see this bird very often so I was very happy to get a decent image of it.

It was good birding but, there were fewer birds than have been at this refuge in past years at this time of year. I’m guessing they know something we don’t and maybe winter will be ending sooner than we think and the birds have been heading home to the north already. I hope that’s it anyway.

It was even better hanging out with dear friends while birding. I hope it’s not too long before we can get together again. We’re hoping for a February trip. Fingers crossed that happens!

I’ll be working on more images from this trip to share too but, if you know me it may be awhile before more images from this trip make it to the blog.

Oh, we have a big event in our family this week. Littlest will be 4 years old this week! Time flies! He’s still really into Dinosaurs, but he’s moving into the Superhero phase, and #1 Grandson has him into Pirates and Colonial American characters as well, but his birthday party theme is Legos! #1 Grandson got him into those as well. Aren’t big brothers the best!! 💗

Baby Girl sent this image of him with a couple of his birthday party decorations. He LOVES that Lego head…so does #1 Grandson! 😜

What’s happening in your life this week, any plans, events, or something new going on?

Fuji X-T3| Fuji 100-400mm| PS CC 24.1.0

more to come…