Carolina Wild Photo (the blog)

For my second installment I’ve pulled photos from previous years when there was snow. The birdbath is a haven for the birds during these icy days. With my feeders nearby, the running water is a bonus for my little feathered visitors. I’m repeating the birdbath photo taken with an old cell phone that I showed in the previous post to remind you what it can look like in a big snow. This is why I can get shots when the ground is covered in snow and frozen over. Like this little Bluebird, everything in the area is drawn to this birdbath when conditions are so harsh.

In this photo my resident mated pair of Bluebirds brave the cold and ice to get a drink of water after a snack of meal worms. Not visible in the photo is running water, behind the snow piled around the edges of the birdbath. This pair has raised at least three broods a year since March of 2015 when I put up my first Bluebird house. Within a few days of installing the birdhouse the Bluebirds were already checking it out, and soon moved in, returning to it every year since.
One of my favorites at the birdbath is the Cardinals. Particularly in winter, the male’s brilliant red color is especially cheery on a bleak winter day. Even the female Cardinals, with their feathers of red and golden brown are colorful enough to brighten a snowy scene. Between feeders and the birdbath I often have three or four pairs of Cardinals in view at the same time.

I’m particularly interested in shots of the Cardinals in the snow since they make great images for my custom Christmas cards. I try to get new images every year when it snows so I have a selection to choose from for the next year’s card design. It all comes down to whether we have enough snow in a particular year to show up in the photos. It’s always a plus if I can take some photos while it’s snowing.
This Goldfinch image was taken during a snow, but it was a light snow, and the snowflakes don’t show up very well. Of course, there are times when it’s snowing so hard the flakes between the bird and the camera are just big blurry white spots, and that’s something of a problem as well. And then there is the poor lighting from overcasts skies that makes it difficult to get good exposures and shutter speeds.

I get a good variety of birds at the birdbath, even in the snow, but obviously some are more colorful than others. The rich red accents of the male House Finch are more photogenic than the female’s simple brown coloration, for example. It takes that rich pop of color to make the otherwise drab winter browns and plain white of ice and snow into an interesting photo.

My little heated birdbath has provided me with many nicely detailed closeups in all seasons. Even when the birds don’t visit the feeders so much in the summer while food is plentiful, they always come for a drink of water, or a cooling bath. It’s the ultimate gathering spot all year round, and never fails to entertain me.

Yep, that’s what I said, a “heated” birdbath. It’s really not that fancy, but it was designed specifically for bird photography, like the Bluebird image here.

The heating comes from an aquarium heater unit placed in the birdbath reservoir next to the fountain pump that continually circulates the water. It hardly makes it a “spa”, but it does keep the water from freezing in the winter. So far it has worked at least down to 5 degrees overnight, and even when it’s below freezing continually, every day for over two weeks in a row, with snow and sleet.
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If you read my previous post, “The Florida Bird Haven Myth”, you already know how disappointed I was with the lack of quantity and diversity of birds on my 9-day adventure across Florida. The full day spent at the bird rookery at St. Augustine’s Alligator Farm hardly lived up to my expectations, based on the reports and stories I read in preparation for the trip.

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It’s the middle of March, 2019, and I just got back from a 9-day trip to sunny Florida to photograph birds that I had never seen in person before. I’d been thinking about such a trip for years, encouraged by the photos and stories I’d heard and read from other photographers. I was excited about finally getting a chance to see and photograph Roseate Spoonbills, and Wood Storks, and Reddish Egrets, and other interesting species. Yeah, so many birds you can’t take it all in – birds, birds everywhere you turn, right there just feet away – so close you have to use short lenses….. Yeah, right! (continue reading…)

This has been an eventful and surprising week at the feeders and bird bath so far this Spring. It started with a male Rose-breasted Grosbeak. For the past several years we usually saw one at the feeder once or twice in the Spring, stopping here on its migration from Mexico or Central America up to the Northeast and Canada. But this year we’ve not only had two male Rose-breasted Grosbeaks at once, but also three females at the same time. And not for a day, but for nearly a week now.

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We’ve made two more trips to the Blue Ridge Mountains since the last post hoping to find more Fall color, but it was as yet a bit too early, even at the highest elevations. The photo at right is one of the best representations of color from these two most recent trips, in the 3rd and 4th weeks of September. The near ridge shows a good bit of color, while the more distant ridges had little or none. I’m not sure how this works. Perhaps it’s merely elevation differences, though there is no way to tell how the ridge elevations differ in this view. (continue reading…)

The photo at right is of Looking Glass Rock on the Blue Ridge Parkway. Obviously it’s not my usual feathery frocked subject matter – but still, this all started with a couple of “birds”. You see, I’ve driven a red Firebird for the past 23 years . . .  actually two red Firebirds . . . a ’94 Firebird, then a 2002 Firebird. I recently sold the 2002 Firebird that I’d driven for the last 15 years, and brought home a 2018 Camaro. I was itching to get the new Camaro out on the road and try it out. Those twisted, winding mountain roads in the Great Smokies were calling to me. (continue reading…)

As you can see, I haven’t posted since March. The Bluebirds weren’t very cooperative this Spring, and nothing new visited the feeders during the Summer. And with the oppressive Summer heat, I don’t get out for photography much. However, there was one thing I did some planning for…… The Solar Eclipse of August 21. I could have stayed home and viewed a 90+% eclipse, which is more than I’ve ever had a chance to see, but with the circle of totality within a 5-6 hour drive, I decided to go for it…. totally… or rather totality.

My wife took the photo below
with her tablet before totality.

With the news media warning what a traffic nightmare it would be to go anywhere for the totality, I did some thinking. I decided a more rural, less populated spot in the totality path might possibly avoid much, if not all of the crowd that was predicted. I found and downloaded a neat file for Google Earth that showed the totality circle as it traversed the US into South Carolina. With that handy tool I zoomed into Google Earth looking for likely locations with public access near the center line of the totality path and settled on a Walmart parking lot in Newberry, SC.

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Well, it’s late March and finally I feel like there is little threat of any more freezing temperatures. So I decided to look back at the February snow and some of the photos I got of birds while those frozen flakes were coming down. Every year I try to get some new shots of birds in the snow to use for my Christmas cards. Looks like maybe this male Cardinal will be the one I’ll use when Christmas rolls around again. (continue reading…)

I’ve posted other articles on this blog about Cambridge, Maryland, so this is nothing new. But every time I visit my spot on the Choptank River I come away with a few more worthwhile images of ducks. They’re fun to watch, and lovely to look at. This year the birds have been a bit scarce wherever I’ve gone for photos, and Cambridge was no exception. Must be the warmish winter we had, which didn’t push as many ducks southward as usual. But that’s the nature of nature – it can be pretty unpredictable.
I can count on finding American Wigeons at this spot. The drakes’ showy green head patches make them easy to identify. Sometimes they’re an olive green… usually with a golden iridescence like the drake on the left. Sometimes they’re a rich, brilliant emerald green, like the drake in the photo below of a pair of wigeons. Note the white band over top of the head and extending down the forehead to the bill. This white marking has given the American Wigeon the nickname “Baldpate”. (continue reading…)