Birding

My sister, Marsha, and I had the best time going out bird watching last Friday! We went to a place about an hour or so away from here called Johnson-Sauk State Park. They have lovely birdwatching areas.

The weather was very hot and humid. There were storms in the forecast, so we didn't know how long we'd get to stay but it was a fun outing and we didn't care about that...we just wanted to see some birds and have an adventure!

I thought I'd post some photos from our day. Now please note that a lot of the photos I'm going to post aren't for their photographic excellence, but rather for their photographic evidence of sightings and to help ID birds that were too far away to see very well otherwise. In other words, I AIN'T takin' 'em to the fair! Luckily I have a camera that takes photos in the RAW format so I can tweak and tweak again and they still have some sort of value for ID'ing.

Here we go...

Our first exciting visitor was an Eastern Bluebird. He was a real poser...he sat on this branch as if to say, "All right, Mr. De Mille, I'm ready for my closeup". He sat there for a long time while we snapped and snapped some more. He would face us, then turn away, then sit sideways. Almost like he knew how thrilled we were to be actually seeing a bird neither of us had ever seen before in person. We were indeed lucky to capture this one...I should have saved him for last, but I just can't wait for you to see him! (Actually I'm not sure if this bird was a male or female...from my book it looks to be a female because the color isn't nearly a vibrant as the pictures of the male)









Another huge and amazing bird was the Red-Bellied Woodpecker. He was one I had to really tweak to get to see. I took these photos from a great distance away but with a little cropping and a little shadow removal, I was able to ID him.





Here's a Downy Woodpecker. There were a lot of woodpeckers there that day. Quite a few dead trees which attract them. I thought this was the same one as above, that is until I tweaked the photo.



We also saw, but didn't photograph Baltimore Orioles, many little wrens and other un-ID'd peeps, catbirds(well we didn't see them but we heard them), vultures, chickadees, red-headed woodpeckers, indigo buntings, robins, red-wing blackbirds, and the list goes on and on. This wasn't just a good place to birdwatch...it was an awesome place!

A storm started to blow up and these Canada geese came straight up by us...like they were kids looking for a place to hide. Notice the one with the funny downy feathers still on his head on the far right in the photo. He was the bravest, coming right next to us. These were this years early crop of babies with their mom.



We decided that it was getting too ominous to stay out there, so we loaded up and high-tailed it out of Dodge! I got some pix of the storm coming but I'll save those for another day.