I haven’t posted in ten days. It’s not that I haven’t thought about all of you. Or had things to say.
To hold my place in your memory I’ll post a lovely picture of something. Let me go look and see what I have that you might not have already seen here.
There.
I’ll be back when I have a moment.
It seems like it’s been a long time since I promised to show you the best images from my latest walk at Kensington.
While I was walking it didn’t seem like I was taking many photos. But when I go back and look there are way too many ‘best’ images.
So it will be hard to choose just a few. I so much wish you could all walk out there with me.
Though I know from experience that I do better photography when I’m walking alone. No one really wants to keep waiting for me to catch up.
I also don’t want to be those annoying people who talk so loudly while walking in the woods that they broadcast their arrival long before they’re visible.
And I have never understood those people who are racewalking through the trees. I can’t imagine they see much at all.
I have a hard enough time spotting wildlife when I’m moving along at my snail photographer pace.
Anyway, here’s a handful of images that I really enjoyed taking.
I hope you enjoy them too!
From my walk a week ago at Kensington.
At first glance I thought I had a tree filled with blue jays. But one is not like the others.
Ha. Made you look!
I went out to Kensington this morning. I haven’t been there to walk among the birds in a long time. I have loads of images to share with you. But this little sequence made me laugh.
I hope you enjoy it. too.
When I get some time I’ll look at what else I found and I’ll share the best of it with you. It was a wonderful day in the woods.
Last week we got our first significant snow of the season. We’d been enjoying unseasonably warm weather for most of December and January, while at the back of our minds we worried about our landscaping that needs a blanket of snow to survive until next spring.
A definite benefit of being retired is that we don’t have to worry about commuting to work in a blizzard. If we don’t want to go out we don’t go out. It’s just one great perk of getting older.
Sometimes we forget there are benefits to aging.
Anyway, I digress.
After days of warning from the pessimistic weather folks the storm hit us very early on Friday. First there was rain, then ice, then snow.
Early Friday, while taking the dog out for her morning ritual and stepping carefully down the icy driveway in the dark, we noticed a neighbor mincing his way down the street with his dog.
Of course we went out to road to talk. Penny got to kiss Oliver, (the dog) who is somewhat besotted with her. The neighbor said there were some trees down up the road. I said I hadn’t looked out back yet.
As the morning filled with light I saw that we, too, had some bending trees, some limbs down, the typical damage we usually sustain in an ice storm. I sighed. Little by little our birch trees are coming to the end of their lives.
We’ve lived here over 30 years, I guess it’s expected. Nothing lives forever, right?
Throughout the weekend the snow came down, blowing sideways from the northeast. We made very limited trips outside, only for doggie necessities.
Mostly I sat in my chair with a view of a couple of our birdfeeders, watching the frenzy. And eventually, over the weekend, I got a few shots of the birds frantically eating, puffed up, trying to stay warm.
I had to fill all the feeders, the thistle, the oiler, the peanut, the suet, at least twice a day. I even spread extra oilers on the deck railing, and under our rocking chairs that are turned upside down for the winter.
Little birds, and bigger birds too, were everywhere. As the food ran out they waited anxiously in the trees, coming down to wait closer as soon as I’d step out the backdoor. My birds know I’ve got their backs.
And I know you’ve all seen photos of my birds at the feeders before. So in this post I tried to show you more unusual shots, a little attitude, a bit of wing.
I feel very lucky to be able to sit in my chair by the window and watch the entertainment happening just on the other side of the glass.
I hope you all enjoyed it too!
I took myself to Kensington a week or maybe more ago, hoping to get some great bird photos. There’s always something to see out there, and the warblers are migrating, so maybe…I hoped.
But the entire time I was at the park I had camera lens focus issues.
My images were so bad I almost forgot about them. But regardless of the quality, I’ll share with you the best of what I consider a pretty sad batch of images, just because no matter what I capture, even if it’s not much of anything new, I’m always glad I went to Kensington.
And I’m always glad to share with you my adventures, as tame as they often are.
A lot of the time on this walk I took pictures of plants. Because, as I told one photographer last year who was noticing me focusing on berries instead of birds, plants don’t move.
In fact, this trip to Kensington I spent most of my time looking at the way light played in the dark woods.
Turns out it plays rather well, don’t you think?
But of course the birds kept bringing me back as they hovered over me, sometimes landing on my camera lens, asking for something to eat. They are very persistent.
It’s pretty hard to ignore them, even if you aren’t happy with the images you’re getting.
Sometimes I just feed them and don’t even bother trying to capture the magic.
Other times the birds and the light work together and I get something interesting.
I had so much trouble on this walk through the woods, capturing anything the way I wanted to, it got discouraging.
Focusing on plants as a last resort I wandered some more.
I eventually decided it just wasn’t going to be my day, and headed back toward the car.
But just before I got to the parking lot I saw one more trail, one that headed out to where I sometimes saw unusual stuff. It wasn’t a long trail.
Maybe it was worth a bit more walking.
And there I found a dead tree, quite a ways away, but full of some sort of woodpecker family.
I thought it might be a group of red headed woodpeckers. The light made it difficult to see anything but silhouettes. But looking at the images later I saw the yellow on the underside of a wing, and I believe this was a flicker family.
Regardless, they were very busy hopping around the tree looking for bugs and flitting from branch to branch.
And while I was focused on them I noticed movement out of the corner of my eye, way down at the other end of the bridge. Something fliting around the touch-me-not flowers, far from where I was standing.
I shot blindly, not seeing anything in my viewfinder…
…but hoping for something. And the most beautiful female hummingbird showed up when I looked at the images at home.
She sure made me smile.
And then there was a noise on the other side of the bridge and I found this little female common yellowthroat. She made my day!
So the moral of my story is don’t give up. Walk down that little extra trail even if all you’ve had before is disappointment.
You never know what you’ll find. It could be magic.
And Kensington never disappoints.
I’m supposed to be sharing with you images of my short camping trip to Michigan’s UP. And I will…really. But this morning as I was busy washing dishes I happened to look out the window and, surprise, this guy was standing on our deck railing.
This is a green heron. They fish in the pond across the street, and they used to nest every summer in the vacant land behind us. But there’s houses back there now.
I haven’t seen the green herons all summer, nor last summer either that I remember. So this was really special and I just had to share him (or her) with you!
Change Is Hard 