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!
Which one of these is not like the others?
Tag Archives: Kensington
Titmouse v.s. chickadee
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.
Almost lost track
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 saw a cardinal yawn
So when I left you last I had backed away from a crane scuffle and had resigned myself to photographing plants. But I really wanted to get great shots of birds.
I was feeling discouraged.
I moved slowly through the wetlands, enjoying the wildflowers but keeping my ears open for bird calls. Eventually I made my way back into the woods where the light was dim but a few birds were happily fliting around.
I felt a bit of hope. I decided that every trip out to this park taught me more about photography and even if I didn’t get my dream shot, the experience of just being in the woods was worth all the blurry bird images I was likely to capture.
I walked slowly, and didn’t offer any birds seed from my hand unless they were obviously asking for something. It was late morning and most of them would have finished their breakfasts long before I showed up.
In fact everything seemed pretty quiet.
I used the Merlin app on my phone to listen for any interesting birds. I wasn’t hearing very much.
Then I remembered that I was going to try and stand still and wait while I was out in the woods. That moving around, even slowly, made most of the animals and birds skitter away.
So I stood.
And very soon, flying fast up the path at the level of my head, was a male red-bellied woodpecker.
I offered him something from my hand, but he wasn’t having it. He was, however, obviously wanting something to eat. So I tossed a peanut onto the trail behind me and immediately, even before the peanut hit the ground, he was on it.
And so was his youngster, waiting to be fed. They were in the shadows so the image of him feeding the young one is grainy. But it was so cool I wanted you to see it anyway.
Then they both flew up into the tree, dad on the front to ask for more food, and junior on the backside waiting for his free meal.
Poor dad worked so hard. He’d grab something from the trail where I tossed it and fly to a tree where two young woodpeckers noisily followed him. I don’t think he got anything to eat himself.
The trio followed me for a good quarter mile. He’d zoom past my head and land on a tree trunk, and I’d toss him something that he’d take to his two freeloading kids.
Meanwhile other birds were gathering to watch. There was a young nuthatch who would have enjoyed an oiler, but was afraid to enter the fray.
And a disgruntled blue jay.
And overseeing it all, strangely quiet, was the neighborhood blackbird.
Eventually I got away from the family of woodpeckers and started seeing other little birds.
It was getting toward noon, the sun directly overhead, and most of the birds were settling down.
They weren’t hungry, but if I was still I could see them tucked in among the branches.
I figured it was time to head back to car. I could use a snack myself.
But on my way back to the car my Merlin app said there was a common yellowthroat nearby. And guess what? I found him!
And just up the trail, hopping around in a cedar tree was a female common yellowthroat! I’ve never seen one before, it was so exciting!
But what about the yawning cardinal, you ask? Oh yes, he was settling down for a nap in a bush when I walked by.
I guess I was boring. Or maybe he was just too sleepy to be polite.
Oh, and on the drive out of the park I stopped to watch the osprey and her 3 young.
It turned out to be a spectacular day. And I learned more about photographing birds. I can’t wait to get out there to try again.
Still trying
One morning last week I gave in to my itchy shutter finger and went out to Kensington to try to photograph birds who aren’t the regular suspects.
I’ve been watching, on a Facebook group, nature photographers capturing some stunning images of birds from my favorite park. I asked one of the photographers if he was finding these birds on the nature trails there.
He said he was wandering around other areas of the park, and that made sense to me. Sure the titmice and chickadees and nuthatches were hanging around looking for a treat, making them easier to photograph. But what about other birds, those that aren’t into landing on hands or snacking on oilers?
So I went out to the park and stopped at a picnic area quite a ways from the nature center. It had a picnic pavilion and a swing set and quite a large open area, surrounded by large, mature woods. I was the only person there. I used my Merlin app to find out what birds were near.
The place was overrun with robins. But there was also a flicker singing right at the tree line. I followed him for quite awhile…but didn’t have the right settings when he flew up from a branch.
Still, I sort of like the image. It would have been stunning if the wings were sharp.
I adjusted my settings.
I found a bluebird who agreed to sit still for me, though he was a long way away and cropping the image shows the noise. Still, he’s cute, and everyone loves a bluebird.
Mostly I chased the flicker around, and never got a better shot of him. Eventually I gave up and drove over to the nature trails where I found myself walking behind this couple.
They were in no hurry, so neither was I.
But then there arose a loud screeching of another crane pair coming in for a landing.
The original cranes were less than happy and much squawking and wing flapping ensured. The woman at the other end of the trail and I stood still, not wanting to get involved.
Eventually I backed up and headed down another trail where I found beautiful things to photograph that don’t move around so much.
It’s so much easier to photograph plants.
And they make me smile too.
So I wonder….did I ever find any more birds to photograph? Was I successful at getting any good shots?
I guess you’ll have to wait and see.
A tale of customer service
Some of you know that I spent most of my career in banking. The last 13 years of it were spent in mortgage banking, but the before that, for about 7 years I was management in retail banking. IE, a branch manager.
I managed different sized offices during that stint, some really small, some really big. All of them were busy, back in the days before electronic paychecks and even before ATM machines.
I remember lines out the door on General Motor’s weekly paydays. And cars constantly lined up in the drive-throughs on Friday evening when we stayed open late.
Working with the public can be stressful. I get that. But somewhere along the line customers got cut out of the service equation.
This week I realized my credit card was expiring at the end of May and I hadn’t received a replacement card. I’ve had this card since 1980. It says so right there on the plastic, and I’ve never had an issue like this.
So I figured I’d just call in and find out when I might expect the card. It wasn’t like I had any grand purchases planned, but it’s handy to have. I called the 800 number on the back of my card, the number for Customer Service.
After listening to several instructions to push 1 or say yes or no, I listened to a few advertisements for things they could do for me, none of which I was interested in. And interspersed between the ads, were suggestions about how much easier it could be if I’d just download the mobile app. Or perhaps I’d like to go to their website where surely I could solve all my problems.
All of this repeated for many long excruciating minutes, with ugly background noise disguised as music enhancing my enjoyment. They were experiencing a ‘high volume’ of calls and the wait time might be unusually long.
Huh. On a Tuesday night at 6:30 they were experiencing a high volume of calls? OK, I needed to go to band rehearsal, so after waiting for 15 minutes I decided to try again on another day.
Early Wednesday morning I called again. The same irritating music, the same ‘high volume of calls.’ I waited almost 20 minutes and hung up in disgust. It was obvious they were not interested in talking to me.
So I decided, what the heck, I’ll just drive to my local branch with my expired card and have them help me figure out what to do. Seemed so simple I don’t know why I didn’t think to do that from the start.
This afternoon I stopped by my branch.
There was nobody sitting at any of the customer service desks. The lights on that side of the building weren’t even on. There was a stock broker in a suit sitting in his office, but he wasn’t the appropriate person to fix my credit card issue.
Behind the teller line was one man, talking to a customer about a problem. It seemed quite complicated. At the far end of the teller line counter was another man running money through a counting machine. I couldn’t see it, but I’ve been around equipment like that enough to recognize the sound.
He never looked up.
I waited at the “enter here” sign for the employee to finish with the only other customer in the building. I waited a long time. And I noted he did not provide a solution to the customer’s problem.
Finally the man with the problem left and I approached the teller window. “You’ll need to go down there,” said the employee, nodding his head at the man on the end, still busy counting money. “I don’t have any money.” And he began to walk away.
“I don’t need money.” I said.
“Then what do you want?” he asked.
Yep, I’m feeling really weird about this whole place now. No customers, no staff, not even a teller working the drive-through, the curtains there are drawn, there’s no equipment on the counters, something seems off.
“Are you still a full service bank?” I asked.
“Why do you ask,” said the guy still counting money.
“Because there’s no one here.” I responded.
“We just had a bunch of people call in sick.” he replied.
Sure.
Anyway, I told the employee about my expired credit card and he said he couldn’t do anything from the branch and gave me a phone number to call.
An 800 number.
Apparently it’s my responsibility to fix this problem. And I’m not going to get any help from my local branch. If they’re even a branch at all.
I know I’m not alone, but when did customer service stop being a thing? And why must we only deal with people far away in call centers which must be so understaffed that exceptionally high call volume is really the norm and not an exception at all.
Maybe I’m just an old baby boomer who likes to reminisce about the way things used to be. But you youngsters should have been around when customer service ruled. When you got to talk to people face to face. And when they did their best to solve a problem rather than pass it on.
Or back to the customer.
Yep, those were the days. You’d have been amazed.
Note: images are from a walk last month at my favorite park. I never got them into a post, so I figure even if you don’t want to read about banking, and who would, you might enjoy the birds.
May
May is my favorite month hands down. I wish more of the year could be just like May.
So much hope resides in May. The gardens are just waking up, there’s still time to dream about what might be planted and harvested, before the heat of summer bakes the earth and the weeds and insects take over.
Walks in the woods in May are comfortable, a light breeze and sun filtering through newly opening leaves.
Lots of birds come back to town.
Trees are blooming.
Skies are blue. There’s so much to look forward to and I can hardly wait for summer.
But I want May to last a couple months first.
Change Is Hard 