At the end of every year, I do a blog summary of highlights but, when you take thousands of photos a year (as most of us do) and post about a variety of things, it’s hard to whittle it down. So the last couple of years, I’ve identified a theme that I posted about during the year and 2013 has to be BIRDS! This is the year I discovered how much I love them and love taking their photos and, also, the year I realized how much I would like a 400mm lens or at least a 300mm.
But I got a lot of shots I was pretty happy with from my 200mm and a little cropping so here are some of my favorite bird shots of 2013, pretty much in chronological order, beginning with the flying geese above.
Vermilion Flycatcher
Northern Mockingbird
Anna’s Hummingbird
Sparrow
Cormorant
Great Blue Heron
Great Egret
Canada Goose
Black-Necked Stilt
White-Crowned Sparrow
Harris’ Hawk
Northern Mockingbird
Wet (Starling?)
Great Blue Heron
Click on the hummer above if he isn’t animated.
Harris’ Hawks
Mallard
Finch
Bushtit
Verdin
Great Egret
Black-Crowned Night Heron
Mallards (Yin and Yang)
Gambel’s Quail
Cactus Wren
In Audubon Magazine, there was an article called “Ten Reasons to be Thankful for Birds,” this is #10:
They just are.
We have all been transported by simply watching a flying bird.
We have been lifted out of ourselves; we have felt our hearts race when the wings flash by.
Every one of us has seen what really matters–seen it in the blistering stoop of a peregrine, heard it in the richly harmonic dawn song of a thrush, caught its essence in the slow undulations of white pelicans against a blue sky.
And we’ve realized that for those moments, we were privileged to experience something beyond ourselves–that older, greater, glorious world that a wild bird inhabits, and which through its very existence embodies and makes vivid to us.
So, on to 2014…Happy New Year!
Glenrosa Journeys 