Bird Pictures

This weekend I completely organized Libby's and my bird pictures using Picasa's album feature. It's neat, because you can sort pictures in albums without moving them between folders. What I ended up doing was making an album for every taxonomic avian family we've photographed a representative from. This was quite time consuming, but it was also fun. Finding it fun, I suppose, separates me from most other human beings. Anyway, I can now find pictures by folder - which is organized by date or a title indicating the nature of the event we visited, or find a bird picture by family!

I thought I'd share two of my favorite bird pictures so far:

This Anna's Hummingbird (Calypte Anna) was photographed at the San Diego Wild Animal Park back in December when we visited it. I'm mainly happy about catching the iridescence on the head so well, but the fact that it's a hummingbird flight shot is also fun. My biggest complaint (besides quality limitations) is that there's an artificial feeder in the scene.

I found this Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus) at Irvine Park last Saturday when I went to take a picture of the wintering Lewis' Woodpecker and to just spend some time in the great outdoors. I was walking along the little nature trail up on the hillside above the park, when this little Hermit Thrush came right up to me! It was a special moment, as the bird was obviously interested in me for some reason. I was able to reach back, grab my camera (which was still in the bag) and take this one picture before it flew off. Unfortunately, it was obviously a little shady and so the photo's uncomfortably dark, but it's fun to get so close to any kind of bird. It's even more fun to capture the moment!