Lifer number 218. Hey I’m getting up there. But I am a long way away from my friend David Skinner, up there in Canada. He is at 454 and counting. Hey, wait up, Dave, wait for me. 🙂
Oh, back to the lifer. Ann and I were at O. C. Fisher lake this morning and spotted what turned out to be, a couple of Herring Gulls. At first I thought they might be California Gulls. One photo resembled that species.
They were a long way off. I only had my 100-400mm in my hand. The wind was blowing about 25mph and it would have knocked my tripod down if I tried to set up the big guy. So I set the shutter-speed at about 1/1600, zeroed in on them and hand held the camera. I usually shoot at aperture-priority, but in the wind I wanted to be sure that I had a fast shutter.
The images were very, very tiny so I ran them through Focus Magic software. I then was able to crop them to a small 4×5 image. After more finagling around to fine-tune the sharpening, I was then able to use my Blowup enlarging softwaresoftware to enlarge to a usuable 5×7 at 72dpi.
Herring Gull
Herring Gull with Ring-billed Gulls
Like I said, the photos aren’t that great aesthetically, but good enough for identification.
In other news, Diane and Mike Coleman thought they may have seen a Northern Shrike. That would have been a rarity in this part of the state, but not an impossibility. A lot of rare birds have been making this area a stopping place. However, they didn’t get a picture, and the Northern and the Loggerhead Shrikes are so similar, it would be hard to say.
Texas Tweeties by Bob Zeller 