Vacation birds

This post is a little bit in honor of my bird-fanatic friend. I've only relatively recently started taking (attempting to take) pictures of birds, and I blame her. Birds are really hard to take pictures of with a digital camera. Kind of like my grand-niece now that she's walking. You get the perfect shot and by the time the camera takes it, she's across the room. Birds are like that ...no concept of 'hold still for the camera, please'. I do have a few pictures of the birds I saw this year on vacation, so I thought I'd post them.


The first picture is looking down off the side of the trail at Angel's Landing at a pair of peregrine falcons. This picture was actually taken in 2003 when we were out there, but I saw the falcons this year too. I just didn't get close enough to take a picture this year. It's cool that they nest around Angel's Landing. Pretty much the only year we haven't seen them was last year when we saw the condors.

Two birds that were kind enough to hold still for the camera were this green-tailed towhee from the campsite at Bryce and this young western bluebird in the campsite at Zion. Both birds were foraging around the campsites so I had time to take pictures. I will say that I have 'several' pictures of both birds, and these are the ones that came out best. Neither bird really wanted to pose for me in full sunlight so the pictures are darker than I would like, but I think you can see them. The towhee has a red crest and green back and tail, and the little bluebird has a red breast with blue wing and tail feathers. This young one still had some speckling on the head and down into the back and breast.


The rest of my bird pictures are from my sister's place in Colorado. She has bird feeders and birdbaths which attract a fairly nice variety of birds, including this downy woodpecker on the right and this white-breasted nuthatch on the left. The woodpecker was interesting. It kept flying back and forth from the bird feeder to the tree. I've never seen a woodpecker interested in seeds in a bird feeder, but this little guy kept going back and forth and back and forth. I actually have a picture of him flying between the two, and multiple pictures of him on the tree trunk, but this bird feeder picture came out the best.

My sister also hangs out thistle sacks so she has quite a crowd of finches that aggregate. They jockey for position on the thistle sacks and then visit the birdbath, where they have a nice bobbing and drinking session. These four little guys looked like they were doing an alternating dance routine since their bobbing was nicely timed.



Anyway this is it for my bird post. I'll try to post some critter pictures next.