Wildflowers are Starting!
There is talk of another “super bloom” in California. I missed the one two years ago because I was living in Oklahoma at the time.
But we’ve been blessed with quite a bit of rain the last two months, and it’s looking good for a repeat performance.
Read the rest of this entry »Morro Coast Bird Festival – part 6
While the birds were the stars of the Morro Coast Bird Festival, the landscapes were a bonus. We had both sunny days, and overcast ones.
Read the rest of this entry »Morro Coast Bird Festival – part 5
The Morro Coast Bird Festival in January 2019 featured a variety of trips, many of them centered around the water. However, some of the best birds were songbirds.
I carry around a very heavy Nikon D750 with a Nikon 200-500mm lens. This is the sharpest lens I’ve ever owned, and combined with a good camera sensor allows me to crop a small portion of the image and still come up with a relatively sharp and minimally pixelated image.
Read the rest of this entry »Morro Coast Bird Festival – Part 4
My favorite gull is the Heermann’s, which I had never seen until I moved to California. In its breeding colors as shown above, it is a handsome bird, but only spends the winter with us.
I saw quite a few of them at San Simeon during the Morro Coast Bird Festival in January 2019.
Read the rest of this entry »Morro Coast Bird Festival – part 3
The Morro Coast Bird Festival was four days of amazing birding in my own “backyard.” Of course, most of the birds we saw were water birds.
The horned grebe’s eyes are so red they show up in the water’s reflections!
Read the rest of this entry »Morro Coast Bird Festival – part 2
The Morro Coast Bird Festival held in January 2019 at Morro Bay, California had a huge selection of field trips, workshops, and classes to choose from. I chose two trips in a boat, a walking trip along Morro Bay, and some car caravan trips.
The brown pelicans are coming into their breeding colors, but I had never seen one fly with his huge head dangling down like this one.
Read the rest of this entry »Morro Coast Bird Festival – part 1
I treated myself to four days of birding at the Morro Coast Bird Festival in January 2019. Although I chose some trips to areas I was already familiar with, I found it extremely beneficial to go with someone who pointed out birds I had never seen before.
Read the rest of this entry »A Yellow House Finch
House finch males are normally raspberry or orange-red in color, but occasionally a male turns up with yellow plumage. I was lucky enough to have one show up at my feeder in Paso Robles, California on Feb. 17, 2019.
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