It’s been three weeks since I last visited Kensington, my favorite park, feeding and taking pictures of the birds.
Those of you new here probably don’t know about Kensington, where the wild birds freely come down to outstretched hands for treats.
Chickadee
Most people seeing this for the first time think it’s odd and wonderful, all at the same time. Which of course it is.
Male junco
Feeding the birds is one of my favorite things to do in the whole world and if I lived closer I’m sure I’d be there every day. There are some lucky people who are able to do that. I think some of the birds probably recognize them as regulars.
Curious titmouse
I see some people walking the trails for exercise, but the majority of people are there to experience a bird landing on their hand, or to photograph birds. Or both.
It’s been so long now since I took these pictures that I can’t remember the stories that go with them. So mostly I won’t narrate the birds’ thoughts. Suffice it to say that they’re mostly all about the food.
“Do you have treats over there?”
Mostly I was trying to get images of birds moving, they’re so beautiful in flight. But often I had the camera focused on my hand, waiting for the birds to land, and their wingspans turned out to be just outside the focus area. Lesson learned.
Still, you can see how complicated bird wings are, and how beautiful.
As photographers we were so lucky that day — the sun came out, so even though it was very cold and windy we got some beautiful light.
Mourning dove
We spent a good two hours standing next to a small tree that seemed to be the launching ground for little (and some not so little) birds to buzz over to our hands.
Female red belly woodpecker
We didn’t have to go look for the birds, they heard (through the grape vine?) about us and zoomed right over.
Chickadee underside
But eventually the sun lowered and the chill intensified. The handwarmers I put in my boots were now cold and so were my toes.
Showing off her red belly
It was time to go home, but we didn’t want to leave our little friends. They were still busy coming and going.
Coming and going
They weren’t giving up on us…how could we give up on them?
Male downy woodpecker
But they had eaten a lot, their bellies should be full. And in the morning a whole new bunch of people would be on the trails, hands outstretched filled with oilers and peanuts and suet balls.
Where you going, ladies?
Breakfast will be served.
Oh…on a previous post I said that we saw something beautiful on the way out of the park…but this post is already way too long. So I guess you’ll have to wait just a little bit longer.
Are you sure my breakfast will be here early tomorrow?
Ten days ago I took you with me while I searched for the redheaded woodpecker. And as you saw, we found the noisy little guy almost right away! So did we turn around and go home, having achieved our mission?
Hey guys! I’ll fly for a peanut!
Well of course not!
I know I’m out of focus but look at my beautiful, piano key, wings!
I have sooooo much to show you that it’s hard to choose! But I think you’ll enjoy our effort to get a good shot of the park’s smash and dash thieves, the brilliantly hued, but common, blue jays.
Who you calling common?
While other birds joyously drop down to hands filled with special treats, select a morsel and flit back up into the trees to enjoy their snacks, the blue jays stalk park guests, skulking up in higher tree branches, then drop lower to scout out the situation, as they wait for an opportunity.
This girl looks promising, she has whole peanuts, my favorite!
And when they see it, when the timing is just right, they swoop down, slam into the giver’s hand, grab the best treat and spill the rest of the seed on the ground as they dash back up into the trees to enjoy their spoils.
Oops, missed the jay.
The rest of the birds stay out of the way and watch. It’s a kind of entertainment for them, too.
Wow! I think the thief went that-a-way!
Plus they get to gather the leftovers from the ground after the blue jay’s dramatic exit.
We spent a lot of time standing in one place trying to get images of the blue jays coming down for their smash and dash.
Oops, missed again.
Mostly we got shots of the empty hand, or a blue jay behind.
I know my photographer friend has at least one excellent image of the blue jay just before it landed on her daughter’s hand, but my best shot was of him racing away.
He got the peanut and I got him!
We had so much fun trying to capture an image of the jays and watching the other birds. It was cold that day and everybody was hungry. I have lots of images of smaller and more polite birds that would like their stories told too.
We mourning doves get passed over for more exciting birds all the time.
I told them I wasn’t sure if you all were prepared for more bird blogs. After all, when you’ve seen one bird, you’ve seen them all…..right?
Wait! Don’t you want to see me too?
Of course not right!!! Stay tuned. I have lots of beautiful birds, and a special surprise that we found on our way out of the park that afternoon.
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.
Do you see what I see?
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.
Maybe if he looks at us he will be more obvious.
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.
Well that’s more obvious.
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!
I think he (or she) might be young. Notice the brown feathers between the eyes. Juvies have brown heads.
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.
The black and white feathers on their backs make them very elegant birds.
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.
Portrait of a beautiful bird.
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!
Well, at least I got SOMETHING! That black thing at the bottom is the photographer’s hat.
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’m in another one of my funky, can’t figure out how to do stuff, phases. You know how it is (or maybe you don’t), you’re bee-bopping along doing stuff you’ve always done and suddenly something doesn’t click.
Sometimes literally.
Shooting through a window, with the glare of other windows reflected and struggling to focus.
Earlier this month I questioned whether I should print my blog, as a way to preserve it. Several of you had ideas, and others of you had wondered about their own blogs, so were following along.
Last week I wandered around the PixxiBook site, (thanks Linda!) a company that prints blogs into hard covered books with a really easy interface. They have options of choosing which posts you want to print, or you can choose a specific time period.
My issue is, and always will be, the size of my blog. I’ve been writing here since 2006, with over 3,300 posts. Still I was curious.
So, after a few days of thought, I put my URL into their ‘go ahead and try it’ box and it started to go to work. Pretty soon I could preview the results, and I enjoyed very much reading the first couple years of posts in the format the printed version would appear.
Back then I had no images, and the posts were shorter than my ramblings of today. It was fun to reread all about being in grad school as an older student.
Meanwhile the PixxiBook machine was still churning. When I finally backed out of the site several minutes later it had made it through 30% of my blog, indicated there would be 40+ books and the cost was edging up over $4,000.
I smiled, because obviously there’s no way I can ever afford to put my entire blog into hard covered books. It would be bigger than an encyclopedia set! But I will print a few years worth, perhaps those early days in school. And there is potential to just pull the Katie posts out and put them in one book, though I think that will take some work on my part.
Then, later in the week, I was working on a Christmas present, putting photos from a summer adventure into a photo book for someone and I was struggling!
Now, I’ve one projects like this a hundred times, but this time things felt different. I couldn’t find the book template I wanted to use, I couldn’t find the save button, though I remembered that while making my Penny 2025 calendar the system had saved on it’s own, so maybe that was it, I couldn’t get the photos imported…nothing was working the way I remembered it should work.
I spent a couple hours and got only a quarter of the book built when I had to stop for the day.
And, you guessed it, when I went back the next day nothing I had done had been saved. And I struggled all over again finding the pieces I needed to build the book. In the end I did the best I could and the book is designed and ordered and hopefully soon on it’s way to it’s forever home. But geeze.
AND during all this my Lightroom photo editing system decided I’d run out of storage. I have both Lightroom and Lightroom Classic, which I pay a subscription for.
I’d always meant to use Lightroom Classic, because I don’t really want my photos to be stored by someone else in a cloud. But I accidently started with the cloud version, and I never wanted to stop and learn Lightroom Classic.
Franky, when I took the time to go explore Classic it seemed less intuitive and I couldn’t even figure out how to import a photo to it, so I stuck with the Cloud. But now my cloud is full and I really don’t want to pay more, especially with Classic sitting right there on my laptop. So I forced myself to figure it out.
And I’m slowly, very, very slowly, moving that way. I have edited the photos you see on this post using Classic. I’m not entirely happy.
And, speaking of not being happy, I have a new camera and I don’t have it all set up the way I want it yet. Because of course the new camera isn’t exactly like the old camera, otherwise, what would make it new.
Right?
So as I’m trying to take photos of this hawk that was hanging out on my deck and around my birdfeeders, terrorizing my little birds, I couldn’t get it to focus. That’s always been my problem with the Nikon Z series.
There’s a back of the camera focus button which I like to use v.s. using the shutter focus. I thought I had programed the camera to use the back button option, but while taking these photos, I’d focus using the back button, and when I actually pressed the shutter to get the shot it would REFOCUS and because there were so many branches it would focus on those instead of the bird.
Big sigh.
Lucky for me the hawk was concentrating on the little birds trapped in a briar bush below the deck and not me. He (or she) stood still for long periods of time. I finally just put the camera into manual focus and tried that way.
I still have to fix the focus problem, but that means figuring out more stuff. And I’m so tired of trying to figure stuff out these days. I might just go take a nap instead.
Here’s hoping you are having a much more productive and less frustrating month than I am!
No little birds were injured during the writing of this post.
After a beautiful warm fall it’s finally getting cold now, cold like it’s supposed to be in Michigan in December.
We even got some snow, but nothing near what northern Michigan and the UP got. They had feet of snow fall in one day. We had a couple inches and they closed the local schools.
Why, I remember when I was a kid walking through 5 feet of snow uphill both ways to the bus stop. I’m sure you did too. Kids today.
Anyway, I haven’t done anything particularly interesting lately. Certainly nothing blog worthy.
Unless you count watching my birds as they swarm the feeders during these chilly mornings.
Sometimes we even have a bit of sun and then the birds are extra happy. I am happy too, enjoying the light on their feathers, and the sparkle in the snow.
I am hoping to get to my favorite birding park in the next week or so. We’ll see. It seems like every day fills up with things not going to the park related and I think….well tomorrow…and then tomorrow crazy happens all over again.
But if I ever do get out there I’ll share the photos. Cause there are bound to be some images blog worthy from out there.
Who you calling crazy, mom?
PS: Thank you to everybody that suggested ways to print my blog. I’m going to be doing some research!
PPS: And THANK YOU to everybody that donated to my fundraiser for the Truck Safety Coalition! I appreciate every one of you!
How many of you know what a Walktober is? Not everybody? Let me take a moment and explain.
Many years ago Robin, over at her blog, Breezes at Dawn, introduced me and others to the idea of taking a walk in October, blogging about it and then linking our posts back to her blog.
Fall colors aren’t all up in the trees.
People walked from all over the USA, Canada, and from the rest of the world too! She’d collect all our stories and then at an appointed time, perhaps early November, would post on her blog a roundup of sorts, a collection of all our posts, where everyone could read about all the walks.
A little chickadee ventures in for a snack.
Robin coordinated this event for years and then last year she needed some support as she was busy with other things, so I did the collection and roundup part.
I think this year there is another person scheduled for this role, but I’m not sure. I’m going to try to find out.
Light is different in the fall too.
But regardless, I think we can put a successful Walktober together, even if there is no one else able to coordinate the effort. I can always do it again, no problem at all.
Sooo….would you like to go on a walk and show us your part of the world?
As Robin always says, it doesn’t have to be an actual walk. You can go for a jog or a bike ride. You might travel in a car or a train or a subway. Maybe you’ll want to hop, skip or jump your way around. Any way you want to do it is good, just show us your world!
Two cranes preening when one needed to take a biggggg stretch.
Lots of people choose to take their walk in the woods, showing us what fall (or spring if you’re in the southern hemisphere) looks like where they live, but I’ve done a Walktober in downtown Detroit and that was fun too. I’ve also done a Walktober in my own backyard, and one at my family’s house in Alabama.
It just depended on where I was and what I could find that you might like.
Signs of fall are everywhere.
Maybe you’ll be on a vacation somewhere in October, that would be interesting to share with us. I was just in Washington DC and I could have used photos from there, but I think I’ll try to find somewhere different this month to share for my Walktober.
A little titmouse is curious about what we might be offering.
While I’m working on the logistics, you take a few moments and think about where you’d like to take us on your Walktober!
He got his seed to go.
The photos in this post are from a walk at my favorite park, taken in the middle of September with a friend. This park has been featured in many of my Walktobers, and might be again.
Sitting at the dinner table last night I was watching the birds come for their own suppers. I had spread some black oilers on the deck railing and refreshed their bath water in anticipation of watching them while we ate.
Hmmm….who’s this little lady?
The fresh water was a big draw as any number of birds showed up for a quick bath. Then this bird arrived. She didn’t look like any of my regulars.
Well, she likes oilers, that’s a clue.
Bigger than a gold finch, about the size of a warbler, but not a yellow warbler.
She kept an eye on me but didn’t budge.
Greenish gold with darker wings and a little tuft on white near her shoulder.
After she ate she hopped on over to the bathing area.
Luckily my camera was right behind me on the kitchen counter, and the bird wasn’t upset by my reaching for it.
One by one she told the bathing birds to get lost.
All these shots are through a window, with reflections splashed across the image.
Then she hopped in for her own bath.
I think, based on my Michigan bird book, it’s a female Evening Grosbeak.
She had a nice, long bath.
We’re not supposed to have them around here, though they were here a couple of winters ago. Mostly they live way up north. So it could be something else.
Change Is Hard 