Yesterday at Burnaby Lake I managed to get some photos of a Bewick’s wren, which I’d never seen before. Spiffy! Plus chickadees and other assorted birds. Here are a few shots.
A Bewick’s wren and other birbs
birds
Soggy sojourn at Piper Spit, January 2023
A few images from a brief visit to Burnaby Lake on Saturday, January 7th. Brief mainly because it was pouring rain the entire time, but we were determined to get in some birding, dang it.
Starting the new year at Piper Spit (Jan 1, 2023)
A few photos from my afternoon trek to Piper Spit. It was a pleasant day and a stat holiday, so it was kind of packed. But that was okay. Really!
An eagle that won’t sue you
A bald eagle, that is, not Don “Grouchy Grandpa with 60 lawyers watching YouTube like the Eye of Sauron” Henley. Taken at Alaksen National Wildlife Area (next to Reifel Bird Sanctuary):
And a few more…
A robin, shot in terrible light, saved in post!
Herons brooding together in the marshland.
A non-blurry junco
Because I took my fuzzy photo and turned it into a nice crisp drawing!
Spotted sandpiper
When I got my Canon EOS M50 camera in January 2021, the first place I took it to take bird pictures was Maplewood Flats. Unfortunately, it was a gray, misty day, so I didn’t get a lot of great shots. I did get a photo of a spotted sandpiper, but it wasn’t very close. That photo serves as the basis for this bird drawing. I re-interpreted the log to something more stylized because why not?
Maplewood Flats and Colony Farm birdapalooza, November 19, 2022
Another weirdly sunny and wind-free mid-November day for us to shoot birds with our cameras. Both places were teeming with songbirds looking for late season berries and seeds. Maplewood also had a lot of waterfowl along the shoreline.
A few random birds
I’ve been culling blurry or otherwise bad photos from my OneDrive folder, so it doesn’t get filled with…blurry and otherwise bad photos. One terabyte of storage is a lot, until it’s not.
As I cull the photos (closing in on 2,000 so far) I’ve rediscovered some that I quite like. I may have posted some of these before, but the heck with it, I am posting them together. These are typically shot in RAW and then adjusted or tweaked in post.
A spotted towhee
This took longer to draw, not because I lavished extra detail on it, but because I screwed up. I sized the reference photo down way too small, so I ended up with a micro-sketch of an extremely tiny towhee. It did not scale up gracefully, being made of pixels and all, so I basically drew a proper-sized one over top of it. I didn’t really notice my goof-up until I had pretty much finished the original drawing.
But now I’ll know for next time!
Birds, birds, birds
Birds.
At Reifel Bird Sanctuary, November 12, 2022.
Duck!
A female mallard got up on the railing on one of the viewing platforms when we were at Reifel Bird Sanctuary on Saturday, and it was too close to shoot with my telephoto lens. So I took a bunch of photos of it with my iPhone. They turned out pretty good. The duck was very photogenic.
I’ll post more pics from the birding shenanigans soon™.
Snow gooseapalooza
We went birding to Iona Beach, Terra Nova and Garry Point today (all in the Richmond area) and saw snow geese at each spot, approximately 50 million of them, all honking and flapping and flying and pooping.
Here are just a couple of shots. I may pot more later.
