Birding locally is running slow at the moment, but that didn’t keep me from going back to Theler Wetlands in Belfair last week. I ended up seeing a few nice birds like goldfinches and, even better, a family of kingfishers on the creek. Unfortunately, the kingfishers were so far away that the shots I took were rather unimpressive.
In fact, I ended up deleting all the shots except for these two. This first one is it shot of an Osprey heading down the creek towards Puget Sound.
It was a while later while talking to some fellow birders and looking for the Virginia Rail that we saw an Osprey heading back up the river, this time with a fish.
It obliged by flying directly overhead giving me a great shot of the fishing it was carrying.
When I started birding with Ruth Sullivan a couple of years ago, one of her favorite sayings after a day when birding wasn’t very good was, “All we need is one good bird.”
For me, of course, it’s really, “All I need is one good shot.” And though I usually post more than a single shot from a day’s birding, the reality is that in the long run it’s a good day if I even get even one shot I end up keeping. And the longer I shoot, the rarer it becomes that I will get even a single shot better than one I’ve already taken. It’s the experience that really counts, but I’m also driven by another saying a birder/photographer told me while at Malheur this Spring, “The best shot is the one still in your camera.”