Today's birding, including baby kildeer

[jedirunner]

Daughter and I headed out for our near-weekly birding trip (man, this has become addicting!)

Today's sightings included:

• Pelican (again)
• Willet
• Baird Sandpiper
• Black-necked Stilt
• Kildeer
• Baby (yes, fuzzy, *TINY* baby kildeer)
• Gull (California Gull, I think)
• Cassin's Kingbird
• Yellow Warbler (first time we've seen this one)
• Grebe (Clark's, I think)
• Ducks (various)
• Yellow-headed Blackbird
• Red-winged Blackbird
• Pheasant

At home, later in the day, we found among our various finches a *TINY* finch about 2 inches tall hanging out at the feeders, and not scared of us at all (let us get to 6 feet from it and just watch it feed).

Oh, and today we didn't just walk and shoot, but we actually hunted the blackbirds, climbing around in the mosquito-infested reeds near the shore line (just out of the water), and below or at the height of the weeds and bushes. It was a lot easier to get closer to many of the birds this way. But we did have to pull lots of stickers out of the socks, and were really glad we had strong mosquito repellant.

As for photos, here are a few of the better ones.

1. Kildeer

2. Baby kildeer (the adults were either trying to chase it away, or warn it about us, or kill it. They certainly were giving it a hard time. This is a very tiny crop of an extremely tiny bird. It was hard to even see it without the zoom of the camera. Barely larger than the gravelly rocks around it.

3. Black-necked Stilt

4. Gull in flight

5. Cassin's Kingbird (watched several of these play, flying around between this fence and a forest nearby. They seemed to be having a fun time.

6. Yellow-headed Blackbird (hunting these more carefully allowed us to get much closer than we have in the past)

7. Female Yellow-headed Blackbird

Fun morning.

Kevin

 

[Ballistics]

5,6,7 are pretty awesome. 7 is my favorite.

 

[DNK]

Great variety Kevin, no one favorite cause I like them all, well done :thumbup:

 

[sm4him]

Nicely done; love both of those yellow-headed blackbird shots! Nice bird!
And the baby killdeer? The very idea is just TOO cute! I've never seen a baby one--killdeer are TOUGH to get good pictures of, at least around here, because they're skittish, and they tend to wander about in areas where they are so camouflaged they're hard to see until they move.

 

[jedirunner]

5,6,7 are pretty awesome. 7 is my favorite.

#7 has become my favorite as well. I looked over the rest of the set from the morning to decide which should be the final pic, and had decided it was my favorite and should get posted.

Great variety Kevin, no one favorite cause I like them all, well done :thumbup:

TY sir.

Nicely done; love both of those yellow-headed blackbird shots! Nice bird!
And the baby killdeer? The very idea is just TOO cute! I've never seen a baby one--killdeer are TOUGH to get good pictures of, at least around here, because they're skittish, and they tend to wander about in areas where they are so camouflaged they're hard to see until they move.

Thanks. Yeah, the kildeer are always on the move. They do like to stay on the ground and can be hard to see. We've been lucky to find enough of them that we've found a few we could see reasonably well. But that baby? We didn't even know he was there until we saw the 3 adults all hopping all around it and chirping (mad cause he left his home? maybe he didn't clean his room?). We zoomed in on the scene and that's how we even found the baby. Crazy small.

Kevin