We’ve just returned from an interesting trip to Santa Rosa. Originally I’d been planning the trip to get away from the constant rain we have been having this Winter in the Pacific Northwest and to get in some serious birding — though Leslie may have had slightly different plans.
We definitely didn’t escape the rain. Although it was clear when we left home, the rain increased the further south we went. Just south of Mt. Shasta, we rain into such heavy rain that I considered trying to find a place to pull off the freeway because cars were whipping by me at 70+ miles an hour while I was doing 50 in the slow lane because I couldn’t see more than 20 yards in front of us with my windshield wipers running at full speed. My caution was confirmed a few miles down the road when we spotted several fire engines, medical vehicles and highway patrol cars trying to clear a multi-car crash scene that had traffic backed up for almost twenty miles.
Luckily, the weather had improved the next morning when we headed out to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge. It wasn’t raining, but heavy clouds covered most of the sky, though the sun was just rising in the East, creating an Alpen Glow that made Leslie’s early shots quite beautiful.
Leslie didn’t realize that she got a shot of an American Bittern in disguise mode. She told me later that she was just practicing focusing the camera.
As it turned out, Leslie got a lot of shots of birds that I didn’t see out my side of the car, like this Mourning Dove.
I did see the Black-necked Stilts. I couldn’t get a shot of them, but Leslie got a nice shot.
The light got increasingly challenging as we drove around the auto tour, but I was still jealous that Leslie spotted these three Snipes that I didn’t see.
In my defense, there was so much contrast between the sky and ground that these birds were nearly indistinguishable from the background until I worked with them in Lightroom and Photoshop, one of the benefits of shooting in RAW. Unfortunately, even Lightroom and Photoshop couldn’t make this shot as good as those taken in the good light we had 15 minutes earlier.