You Choose a Favorite

Hopefully visitors to this site realize that all they’re seeing is highlights of our birding expeditions.  I’m sparing the visitor from having to see all the bad shots that have to be taken before I can get a shot worth showing to others.  On the other hand, sometimes the visitor doesn’t get to see excellent shots that were arbitrarily deleted by the writer/editor/ proofreader/me.

Taking the photos is the fun part of this job; sorting through them, deciding which to delete and which to keep, and fine-tuning those chosen for publication is the hard part of the job

Sometimes deciding which photo to use can be the hardest part of all, particularly when I like all the photos in a sequence. For instance, I took 22 shots of the Snowy Egret that landed right in front of me on the swimming hole at Spring Lake as I waited for Leslie. Unfortunately, I loved all of them.  Not a really bad shot in the whole group, but I’m certainly not going to polish all of them up.  So,  here are six of my favorites from that sequence.

Birding Santa Rosa

The weather in Santa Rosa was not very cooperative with heavy rains for at least two of the days, but I did get out and walk from Lake Ralphine to Spring Lake twice, though the best birding area on Spring Lake was closed because of flooding. 

I’m definitely not going to complain when the days it wasn’t raining were bright and sunny.  There were lots of birds and in general they seemed to be accustomed to having people around and it was easy to get good shots of them. I do see lots of female Bufflehead around home, but seldom as close as this one was.

The males seemed particularly bold, though, perhaps because there were a lot more males than females, and the males had to seem courageous to attract a mate.

It takes nearly perfect light to capture both the black and white feathers of the male Bufflehead. It had to be tweaked in Photoshop, but I was really happy that the white feathers weren’t washed out.

There were a lot of birds singing along the trail between the lakes, but it was nearly impossible to locate them.  I felt lucky to get this shot of a Yellow-rumped Warbler.

This Spotted Towhee was hard to miss as it posed for its shot instead of disappearing into the underbrush as they usually do.

My favorite shot of the day, though, was this shot of a Western Bluebird which posed even longer than the Towhee. He posed patiently while I circled him to get the best angle.  

I’m always amazed by the number of birds I see at Lake Ralphine and Spring Lake despite the considerable number of people walking and riding bikes there.   

Back to Ft. Flagler

It’s been a long, rainy winter here in the Pacific Northwest, so we haven’t gotten up to Ft. Flagler and Port Townsend this winter. Cloudy skies were predicted, but I decided we would take our chances and go to Port Townsend.  I told my grandson I was thinking of heading up there, and he said we should stop and see him at the Firehouse where he has been working for the last couple of years.  So, even though it looked a little unpredictable when we got up, I decided I would go anyway. I’m glad we did because the firehouse tour was the highlight of our trip.  Luckily, Leslie got pictures of our visit and posted them to her Facebook pages because I was too busy talking and looking to remember to take pictures.

We arrived a little later than usual at Ft. Flagler only to be confronted by some of the coldest temperatures I’ve ever encountered there.  To make matters even more interesting, it was also one of the highest tides we have ever seen. If the tide had risen any higher, I don’t think we could have made it to the point, and most of the birds we saw were near the point, all huddled together trying to stay out of the wind.

The first and most common birds we encountered were Sanderlings running up and down the shoreline.

A little further up the beach, we began to run into Black-bellied Plovers still in winter plumage

interspersed with Dunlin, smaller than the Plovers but larger than the Sanderlings.

I didn’t go all the way to the end of the point because the birds were packed in so densely that I didn’t want to disturb them.  I did go far enough to get a shot of the Brant that are often found feeding on the seaweed found between the two points. 

Naturally, the light improved as we got back to the car, while small, mixed flocks of Plovers and Dunlin ran across the lawn

My favorite birds at Flagler are the Harlequin Ducks, but sadly we only spotted a single pair, and they were too far away to get a decent shot of them.  

Reviewing the photos I took, it was probably one of the more disappointing trips we’ve taken to Ft. Flagler, but considering how seldom we managed to get out in the last few months it was a very enjoyable visit. We definitely look forward to getting out more soon.

Only Now, by Stuart Kestenbaum

I’ve been reading Daniel Kahnema’s 555-page-long Thinking Fast and Slow for several weeks now, hoping to comment on some of his ideas. I’m determined to eventually finish it because it gives important insight into why we as humans make so many bad decisions.  It’s clear why it earned Kahneman the Nobel Prize in 2002, but, as I struggle to read and understand it, it also became clear why my granddaughter is learning ideas derived from it in her freshman college class. This old brain takes much longer to comprehend complex ideas than it used to, which, unfortunately, does not come as much of a surprise. 

So, I decided I would turn to some short poetry books I have acquired in the last couple of years.  Luckily, Only Now, by Stuart Kestenbaum resonated with me, so I finished its 74 pages relatively quickly.  

Although I couldn’t find a biography online, one article states that Kestenbaum is 70 (a mere youngster, as it were) and several of his poems deal with subjects we all face as we age. For instance, in “Passage” he describes a ninety-three-year-old friend lying in a nursing home bed. In “Scattered” he describes spreading the ashes of someone who has passed on. 

Kestenbaum manages to make even poems that focus on death inspirational, but the poems I liked best are the thoughts of someone who is looking back but still trying to stay in the moment, to savor what little time is left, as it were. Not surprisingly, the title poem conveys the main themes of the volume.

Only Now

Only now 
do you realize 
how quickly 
everything passes 
how we 
are
here’s for 
a blink of God's eye 
how the light passes 
by us and through us 
how the world 
began with a breath 
and a cry 
earth and sky.

I don’t think I would want to teach this to a class of high school students because they probably haven’t lived enough to understand it, but it sounds exactly like the kind of poem I would write at this point in my life if I could still write poetry.  It sounds like the kind of insight you would read in Taoist or Zen literature if it weren’t for the phrase “a blink of God’s eye.”  The photographer in me particularly likes “how the light passes/by us and through us.”  

“Only Now” was an easy choice, but I had a hard time choosing a longer poem to represent his work because I liked so many of them.  Most of those included “prayer” in the title, though they seldom seemed like the kind of prayer you would hear in church. I don’t know much about Judaism, but most of these prayers seem to suggest the sacredness of everyday life rather than a specific religion.

Ultimately, I chose “Prayer for Beginning” because it confronts the uncertainty that all of us, no matter our age, face every day.  

Prayer for Beginning 

You’ll never know how it will end
most days you don’t even know 
how it will begin. Will it be 
a clean slate day, a morning 
when you carry nothing 
from the past into now, 
or will your mind be loaded up 
like a small U-Haul, filled 
with the imagined words 
of your father, last night’s dream
something you shouldn’t 
have said the night before 
and a truck down-shifting 
outside your window, so you put the key 
into the soul’s ignition and start driving 
down the road where the sleeping houses 
reveal themselves slowly in the dawn 
and the birds are calling to the light. 
Another day alive and singing. 

I’ve never been fond of mornings, being more of a night owl than an early bird, but even I love “clean slate” days. Mornings can be tough, more often than not preceded by a bad night, one where it seems I spent more time worrying than I did sleeping or one where loud, or even not-so-loud, noises wake me up and make it hard to get back to sleep. 

No matter what kind of night I’ve had, hearing the birds singing in the morning always lifts my spirits, particularly if I’m heading out for a day of birding.  Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.