It’s been awhile, a really long while, since I’ve been out to Kensington to feed the birds. A photographer friend and I have been talking about it for what feels forever – – stuff just got in the way. But this week we decided we needed to make it a priority, because the weather around here isn’t going to get any better.

With negative wind-chill predicted for next week we decided to get out there Friday afternoon. And boy we’re glad we did because the sun actually came out while we were there. Yes it was cold, but back among the trees, out of the wind, it was magical.

There’s a lot of content in the 765 images I took. Seven Hundred, Sixty-Five! That’s crazy! We were only out there maybe 2 hours. OK…maybe 3 hours. That’s 255 images an hour, or about 4 every minute…a picture every 15 seconds? Thank goodness it’s digital!

Anyway.

The biggest reason I wanted to be out there with my camera was to find the redheaded woodpecker. Hard to believe that until a couple years ago I had no idea there was such a bird in my area. But then I saw pictures online from Kensington and one winter day I saw him myself!

Now that I know what part of the park I’m most likely to see him, I steered my small party in that direction. Along the way we ran into a couple of other photographers (recognizable by the extra long, super cool 800mm lenses on their cameras) and spent a long time talking to them about camera bodies, lens length, f-stops, tips for bird photography and… wait for it…while we were standing there, 5 people talking camera stuff, the redheaded woodpecker arrived, with much noise and fanfare.

Now that I’ve heard him I will be able to find him more easily because he makes a noise different than all the other woodpeckers around. He was definitely interested in us, just as I was interested in him.

One of the guys with the big camera lens told us that if we threw a whole peanut up in the air the woodpecker would come off the tree trunk and grab that peanut right out of the air! Since we did, indeed, have a peanut like that, he volunteered to throw it so we could try to get a picture of the bird in flight.

I failed miserably, shooting wildly and blindly, but I did get one image of the bird flying, kind of in focus, and I’m proud to have gotten that much!

We had so much fun and spent almost 2 hours standing in one place a bit further along the trail, at a magical tree that was filled with all sorts of birds. Even the redheaded guy came back around. But that all will have to be saved for another post.

I have lots of editing to do!