Although I didn’t see a Bobolink the first three years I visited Malheur — and never even knew such a bird existed — now I’m disappointed if I don’t see one when I visit in late May or early June. Although it’s hard to miss their song, it’s generally hard to actually see one and even rarer when one poses like this one did this year.
These are by far the best pictures
I’ve managed to get so far.
The best chance to test my new camera’s ability to capture birds in flight was taking shots of the innumerable White-faced Ibis we saw at Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. While we’ve long seen ibis at Malheur, I can’t remember ever seeing so many before.
It’s relatively easy to photograph them at a distance when they’re feeding in wetlands, but you’re more apt to see them flying from field to field.
Once you’ve seen them, it’s impossible to miss their silhouette in the sky.
It’s even harder to miss their iridescent colors
when seen in bright sunlight.
Leslie says that they always remind her of Egypt, and I’ll have to admit that I could hardly believe my eyes when I first saw these “exotic” birds in the southern Oregon high desert.
Since I spent a not-so-small fortune on a new camera that was supposed to be superior to my old camera for photographing birds in flight, I tried to focus on that during our visit to Malheur. I also discovered that since the new camera is a full-frame camera, unlike my previous birding camera, that the pictures had to be cropped much more severely than I’m used to doing.
This female Northern Harrier was
quite aways away but I thought the shot was worth saving if for no other reason than that it was my first shot of a bird in flight with this camera.
This male Northern Harrier
was also a long ways away, but the light was better and I was really happy with how sharp it came out.
I didn’t recognize this Osprey
when it flew over because it was in the shadows and the white breast looked dark and because I really didn’t expect to see an Osprey in the middle of the desert. I was really happy that I could lighten the breast while producing very little noise.
My favorite shot, though, was this one of a Swainson’s Hawk.
I’ve only seen one or two Swainson’s Hawks in all my years of birding, but, more importantly, it’s the kind of shot I’ve been unable to capture in the past.
One of the highlights of our trip to Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was spotting these Sandhill Cranes with a chick. Sadly, I’ll have to admit that even though I was the one that spotted the cranes, I didn’t see the chick until Leslie told me to stop as we were about to move on. She insisted that she saw a chick, even though I never saw it. When you look at this photo, I think I could be forgiven for not spotting the chick without binoculars — it’s on the left side of the screen in the tall, brown grass.
When I got back to camp that evening and looked at the computer screen, I found that the chick was somewhere in all but one of the shots. I sharpened the little guy in this shot to make it more obvious that mom/dad was keeping an eye on it the whole time.
Surprisingly when I looked back at shots I had taken earlier in the morning of another pair of cranes, there was a chick following the one on the left.
Although we’ve seen Sandhill Cranes several times in the past few years, we’ve never seen a chick before.