And then the rains came……..

November 30, 2015 by Bob Zeller

Rain is nice. Especially here in San Angelo, where it seems we are in a perpetual drought, except some years are worse than others. This past year hasn’t been as bad as some previous. So having said that, we have had drizzly showers on and off the past few days. We have been limited to getting out to just a few hours between rains.

I have only a couple of images to show for the effort.

Ladder-backed Woodpecker

Great Horned Owl

The two images above were captured at Spring Creek Park, here in San Angelo.

In between our treks, I spent time going through some of my old images and I came across a few older ones that you might enjoy. This are just random shots from early 2014.

Ash-throated Flycatcher

Vermilion Flycatcher – immature male

Vermilion Flycatcher – adult male

Western Scrub-jay

White-eyed Vireo

The clouds are starting to part today, so hopefully I will be able to get some new images in the coming week. Click any photo to see enlargement.

Happy birding!!

A little of this and that…..

November 24, 2015 by Bob Zeller

Today , because of some cold weather the past few days, I am just going to touch on a few odds and ends.

Being inside gave me a chance to go back through some of my old files. One of my favorite subjects is the photographing the raptors. Large hawks, etc. Well, going through my old photographs of Red-tailed Hawks, I found an image that I had photographed back on September 27, 2013. In checking my records I found that during that time, we were in Big Bend National Park. I had taken this photo of a beautiful hawk, sitting on a fence post. I had never posted it anywhere before. Looking at this image again, I realized that I had mis-identified it. Not a Red-tailed Hawk, but a beautiful Peregrine Falcon. Back in those days, I didn’t know as much about IDing hawks as I do now.

The irony of it is that the Peregrine Falcon had been on my bucket list to get a great photograph of one. I had seen one in flight in the distance but that is all. Now, here is one that was right in front of me, and I never realized it.

Peregrine Falcon

A few days before the cold front blasted through, our friends, Suzanne and Sid Johnson, invited Ann and I to come down and do some birding around the Eldorado, Texas area. We jumped at the chance, as we love to bird with them, and the birding is usually good around there.

We visited the water treatment ponds there, and it was teeming with many water birds. But we also saw our first Yellow-headed Blackbird and Marsh Wren of the year. Always nice to add to our 2015 list as we still have a way to go to meet our goal of 210. One of the highlights was an American White Pelican on the water. As we drove around checking out the ducks, birds, etc. it was content to just swim and feed by itself.

Eventually, it decided to take flight. I was a bit unprepared for it, but I jumped from the car and quickly was able to acquire it in the viewfinder of my Canon 7D Mark II with a Tamron 150-600mm lens. As it flew toward me I rattled off a few shots at 10 fps. It was shot at 273mm as I didn’t have time to zoom in closer to the 600mm focal length. But with cropping I came away with this nice image. 1/8,000 sec. @ f11, ISO 3200.

American White Pelican

This morning, my friend, Jim Miller, ranted in a post about Lightroom and Adobe’s CC (Creative Cloud). He also jokingly referred to it as Adobe’s Cash Cow. Anyway, he was telling how Adobe is making it harder to edit your photos, import the files, etc.

Personally, I don’t use Lightroom or the Adobe’s Creative Cloud. I am the black sheep, I guess, but I use a much simpler method. I download my photos to FastStone Image Viewer. It is a cheap, read free, software. I convert my RAW images there, then simply import them into my old Photoshop CS5 for editing. I use an old secret recipe that has been handed down. In other words I will not tell you the plug-ins that I use to assist me. 🙂

Using my methods I feel that my results speak for themselves. I have been called the best bird photographer they have ever seen, by some of my peers. I have been published in various magazines, including a back cover shot in National Wildlife Magazine. I am not speaking negatively about Adobe Lightroom as I have several friends, those peers that I mentioned, that use it with great success. So it doesn’t matter what you use. It is knowing how to use what you have.

I guess that’s it for today. Click on any of the images to see some nice enlargements. Hope you enjoyed the post and the photos.

Wood Duck – Filling my bucket list.

November 16, 2015 by Bob Zeller

I think every bird photographer has a certain hard-to-get bird on his or her ‘bucket list’. A bird that has escaped every effort made to get a photograph of it, or even see. Mine was the elusive Wood Duck. In all of my eight years of birding, I had only seen one, and it was a lone female on a very rainy day and the bird wasn’t that attractive. I wanted an adult male in it’s bright colors. Well, I finally got the chance.

We were out at Middle Concho Park driving through. Off to my left, far across the disc golf course, I saw the head of a goose pop up along the near shoreline. At about 150 yards, I couldn’t make out any details. So what to do. I drive across the golf course, of course. Upon arriving, I can see that the goose was a some domestic breed and I started to drive away. At that moment, some Mallards moved out from the shore, and lo and behold, lagging a bit behind them was this beautiful male Wood Duck.

I immediately pulled along parallel to the shoreline so I could snap photos. I snapped a couple of long distance shots of the Wood Duck. It started to move a bit closer but still moving the same direction. It fell in among the Mallards, but within seconds it took flight. I was quick with my shutter and got off several photos. Here are three of them.

Wood Duck

Wood Duck and female Mallard

Wood Duck lifting off.

What great fun that was! But there were more birds to see and photograph. We were surprised to see much activity, as the weather was cool and windy with a threat of showers. We continued on and we saw a huge flock of Black-bellied Whistling Ducks. They were milling around, also near that disc golf course. Here is a likely pair.

Black-bellied Whistling Ducks.

An Eastern Bluebird didn’t mind the dreary weather.

female Eastern Bluebird

All of that happened yesterday, Sunday November 15. Today, the 16th we decided to press our luck again. The winds were much higher, but the temperature was mild. Very overcast. Again, not much activity, but enough to keep us interested.

This Great Egret was content to just sit in the tree and stay away from the water.

Great Egret

This Great Blue Heron wasn’t in the mood to fish, and just decided to just stand and look beautiful. The cloudy overcast brought out his nice blue and gray colors.

Great Blue Heron

Finally, we decided to call it a day, but not before we spotted this Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, a first of the year for us.

Yellow-bellied Sapsucker

That gives us 181 sightings for our 2015 Big Year list. Far below our goal of 210, but we still have over a month to go. 🙂

Birds and the Beasts

November 11, 2015 by Bob Zeller

Wow! People sure enjoy reading about Red-tailed Hawks. That post about Shooting Red-tailed Hawk got a near record number of views around the world. I appreciate all of you. Now I will tell you about the birds and the beasts.

Today, I will bring you up to date on all of the other bird and other images from the past week or so. We have made several trips to San Angelo State Park and the local parks within the Lake Nasworthy environs.

This little critter was munching among the fallen leaves at the blind at San Angelo State Park. I am not sure what it is, as I am not up to date on the rodent population in the park. Perhaps a field mouse of some kind.

Mouse or rodent

This Hermit Thrush showed up at the blind. It was the first time I had ever seen one there.

Hermit Thrush

This is a Dark-eyed Junco, the Oregon variety. We were prowling along the perimeter of Spring Creek Park near Lake Nasworthy and spotted about six of these in one brushy spot.

Dark-eyed Junco

We spotted this Carolina Wren just a few yards away from the juncos. That blurred object near it’s right foot is a blossom on a weed, and I think it caused me to get a less than perfectly focused image.

Carolina Wren

Along the way, we saw this cat, perhaps a feral, or maybe someone’s lost house cat. He may have been eye-balling some of those Juncos.

Feral Cat, I assume

There were many White-tailed Deer in abundance. This one had a beautiful eight-point rack.

White-tailed Deer

We caught this Osprey having it’s lunch on a mesquite branch. He was alert for anything that may want to try to snitch a bit from him. I don’t think he had to worry about me. I was about 175 yards away.

Osprey with fish lunch

Over near Middle Concho Park, we spotted this Porcupine in an open field. He was feeding in the grass and weeds. He look pretty battle-scared in the face, from an old fight with something.

Porcupine

Meanwhile, back at San Angelo State Park, this young Armadillo was doing some feeding of it’s own. Back-lit gave it some lighting problems, but I think you can see enough of it’s face.

Nine-banded Armadillo

Hope you enjoyed this post, where sometimes the beasts outnumber the birds. Such as it is in a wildlife photographer’s world. 🙂

Shooting a Red-tailed Hawk

November 7, 2015 by Bob Zeller

Every day that Ann and I go out birding, we hope for an unexpected surprise. This happened to us a couple of days ago.

We had driven out to San Angelo State Park to do our usual drive around through the different areas. For us, it is a slow process as we just creep along in our now new 2016 Ford Escape. At about 5mph (or less), we can have time to scan the brush and mesquite for birds, and sometime critters. We don’t usually have to worry about traffic, as unfortunately for the park, not many people are aware of the great nature opportunities that exist there. On this particular day, we only saw three vehicles.

One of the last areas we visited was the Isabelle Harte Multi-use area. A place laced with hiking and biking trails, a boat ramp, and a paved road meandering through. There are a few picnic tables placed near where the shoreline would be if there was enough water to fill the lake. Hence the tables and boat ramp are nowhere the water.

As we entered the area, we took a turn to take us down near those picnic areas. As we looked to the left, Ann exclaimed, “Stop, there’s a hawk!! I brought the car to a stop and looked to where she was pointing. Sure enough, atop the bare branches of a tree was this lovely Red-tailed Hawk. I took a few preliminary “insurance” shots from where we were stopped. We were about 100 yards away there, but I wanted to make sure that I had at least one image before I ventured closer.

The hawk was just sitting calmly, minding it’s own business. I decided to try to get to a closer position. There was a picnic table and grill a few yards ahead, so I slowly moved forward and turned into the parking spot by the table. At that point I was only about 40-50 yards away and had an excellent shooting position from the driver’s side window. I was using my Canon EOS 7D Mark II with my Tamron 150-600mm zoom lens.

I focused in on him and got a few shots while he was perched. We then sat and waited, as I knew that he wouldn’t stay long and I wanted to get some action shots. I wasn’t disappointed. I had the camera focus points set that I would be able to track it and shoot at 10 frames per second. Everything went off as planned and I got several exposures as he lifted off and flew. Here are five of those images that I got in that sequence. They all have been cropped.

Red-tailed Hawk

We are glad to see the return of the hawk to the area. It had been several months since we had an opportunity like this described. A few minutes earlier we saw two Norther Harriers, hunting and harassing each other, presumably over property rights.

For you photographers who enjoy such information, the data for these shots are: 1/8000 sec. at f6.3, +1.3 stops because the light was at the hawk back, and the ISO was 2000. I used spot metering and spot focusing.

I hope you enjoyed this story and the photographs. Click on any of them to see enlargements.

Closing out a great October

November 1, 2015 by Bob Zeller

October was a successful month for me. I sold some more prints at the Fort Davis Gallery, added some birds to my 2015 list and got some nice photographs for this blog. Actually, it has been ten days since my last post. Longer than I usually would like. But minor health delays, a sinus infection, kept me side-lined for a few days.

So hoping for a nice November, I will show you photos from our latest October forays into San Angelo State Park.

First up is a little Vesper Sparrow. Sparrows have been my personal nemesis when it it comes to identification. There are dozens of sparrow species. The Vesper has that distinctive eye-ring that is a big help, although there others that have some type of an eye-ring, too.

Vesper Sparrow

Then there are the White-crowned Sparrows. To make things more difficult this one pictured is a sub-species, oriantha, that is identified with that black supraloral area, that goes through the eye and seemingly across the front of the beak. Not rare, but uncommon around here.

White-crowned Sparrow

The Northern Mockingbirds are everywhere and they act like they own the state. In fact, they are the state bird of Texas and I guess they are rightfully proud.

Northern Mockingbird

I didn’t notice the fish line tangled around the leg of this Herring Gull, until I enlarged it in my darkroom computer. It was strolling as I photographed it, so I am assuming that got along okay.

Herring Gull

The Western Meadowlark was all alone, just perusing the landscape.

Western Meadowlark

Along the way, this young White-tailed Deer stepped out of the mesquite and gave us a look over.

White-tailed Deer

This Northern Bobwhite was all alone, too. Maybe wondering where the rest of the covey was. I took a few photos then left him undisturbed.

Northern Bobwhite

The female Northern Flicker was in a tree with the morning light shining on her.

Northern Flicker

A Song Sparrow swaying in some weeds of some kind.

Song Sparrow

Some people say that they never have seen a Greater Roadrunner in a tree. They need to follow me around. I see them quite frequently, some quite high off the ground. They don’t actually fly per se, but a combination of climbing and wing-flapping.