To refresh your memory, here is the photo from November’s Bird Quiz. The bird was seen in New Mexico during the month of January. Don’t read any further if you want one last chance to identify this bird.
Category: Birds
November’s Bird Quiz
Can you identify this bird? The photo was taken in New Mexico during the month of January. The answer will appear next week.
Be the Bird!
With Halloween quickly approaching, the procrastinators among us are frantically searching for a brilliant, yet easy-to-execute costume idea. Since this is a birding (among other things) blog, I thought I’d offer a bit of inspiration—costume ideas I’ve collected from around the internet. I’m afraid not all of these look simple and easy to pull off at the last minute, but some were just too creative to pass up. Hopefully, these will get your creative juices flowing! (more…)
Birding Ramah SWA
I wanted to squeeze in at least one more field trip before the first snows, so I joined up with other members of our local Audubon chapter and headed out to Ramah State Wildlife Area. Located in Colorado’s eastern El Paso County, Ramah is surrounded by miles of shortgrass prairie. The views include cows, rolling hills, and Excel Energy’s new windmill farm. There’s a shallow valley that has been dammed to trap rain runoff in wet years.
October’s Quiz: Answer
To refresh your memory, here is the photo from October’s Bird Quiz. The bird was seen in Colorado during the month of October. Don’t read any further if you want one last chance to identify this bird.
October’s Bird Quiz
Can you identify this bird? The photo was taken during October in Colorado. My answer will appear next week.
Bird Photography: A few more tips
This is the last (at least for a while) post in my series on better bird photography. If you missed the earlier posts, just type “bird photography” into the search box at right. I guess you could call these the odds and ends I didn’t mention earlier!
Line
I think of line as the path my focus takes as it moves through a photo. Where do I look first? Where do my eyes go from there? In these examples, my eyes follow an S-curve as I look at the Swan Goose, while they move diagonally through the photo of the Black-necked Stilt. There’s a reason that pictures of meandering rivers and paths are so popular. We visit all parts of the image as we wind our way through. (more…)
September’s Quiz: Answer
To refresh your memory, here is the photo from September’s Bird Quiz. The bird was seen in Colorado during the month of September. Don’t read any further if you want one last chance to identify this bird.
September’s Bird Quiz
Can you identify this bird? The photo was taken in Colorado during the month of September. The answer will appear next week.
Yet More Bugs…
It’s the end of the summer, and what’s a nature photographer to do? Most flowers are languishing in the sultry heat, their leaves brown and crispy as the summer monsoon turns to dry autumn. Gardens look battered from a season of hail storms, insects, and the ravages of sun and wind. The birds have had their families, so the males no longer need to impress the ladies, at least for a while. In many cases, they’ve shed their fancy duds in favor of muted colors that predators won’t notice. This year’s crop of youngsters is also hoping to be overlooked, with tan stripes that blend with the fading grass. Some of the most photogenic birds—tanagers and warblers, for instance, are already wending their way southward.
As I learned on Monday, however, this is a great time of year for bugs.
Mountain Plover 