birds

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.

Spotted sandpiper at the river, Maplwood Flats.
Chickadee, Maplewood Flats.
Killdeer on the seashore, Maplewood Flats.
A rare Cedar waxwing sighting, Maplewood Flats.
Robin in the golden hour, Colony Farm.

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.

Spotted towhee from April 10, 2021
Juvenile bald eagle from April 17, 2021. This was badly underexposed, so it was fixed in Affinity Photo.
Robin looking a bit weird, as they do, April 10, 2021

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!

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™.

Quack, quack.

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.

A group of snow geese flying low over Garry Point.
Snow goose against the clouds, over Garry Point.
Coming in for a landing.
Trio in flight over Iona Beach.
A small group hanging out just offshore at Terra Nova.
Not a goose.

Reifel Bird Sanctuary and Brunswick Point photos

A few photos from both locations. Reifel was sunny but in the morning was cool, hinting at the eventual fall weather to come. By midday, it was back to feeling summer-like, though.

Meta photo of me taking a photo of Nic taking a photo of a duck, with both our shadows visible.
House finch enjoying some berries.
Some of the 50 billion snow geese that have migrated in for the winter.
Chickadee looking criminally cute.
Bald Eagle at Brunswick Point.