It’s been at least six weeks since I last posted to my birding website and I’ve had two friends who have recently brought my lack of posting to my attention. So I’m providing an explanation and trying to get motivated to resume my posting activities.
This spring I became motivated to try to analyze/record our spring migration with regard to what I observed in our yard. (All references you see here will apply only to our yard and not the greater area of the Cap Sante Neighborhood, Anacortes or Fidalgo Island.) May has traditionally been our greatest month for migration so I designed a form for daily recording purposes, forms design having been one of the skills I cultivated and used in my employment as a payroll manager some 20+ years ago.
Despite my experience in both birding and forms design, my initial form failed to survive the first week of observations and I hurriedly resorted to trying to keep records with my cell phone. I think my efforts were successful… I’m still trying to convert/incorporate early May observations to the final format of the log upon which I decided.
To give you a little appreciation of my activities, I would try to spend some amount of time in the yard each day, generally mostly in the afternoons since that is when most of the bird activity seemed to occur. (This has always seemed strange to me because in Texas most of the activity occurred during morning hours.) My time in the yard was spent:
- Trying to identify migrants in the mix of all the other birds moving around the yard.
- Trying to photograph migrants for as long as they remained in the yard.
- Trying to record migrant species, numbers and arrival times and without recording the arrival of the same bird twice. (Obviously, as bird watchers will appreciate, this is a highly subjective task!)
Some observations occurred outside my “yard time” due to sighting a migrant from inside the house… which in some cases would initiate “yard time”.
At the end of the day I would:
- Attempt to edit my notes, in some cases reconciling them with photographs and time stamps.
- Process photographs, which included deleting “non-keepers”, cropping, adjusting exposure-related issues, assigning a sex code when I could discern the difference, adding a quality rating code and renaming each photo to the species of the bird pictured.
- To save time, in some cases I would send photos of special birds to family and a few friends in lieu of creating a blog post.
It was not unusual, on a good May migration day, for me to take well over 200 photos! So that, in somewhat more than the proverbial nutshell, is the tale of why there haven’t been any recent blog posts!
I’ll try to post some recent photos soon. In the meantime, if any readers are interested in habitat (as in yard) improvement to attract birds, staging your yard for birding photography, birding photography techniques or use of Adobe Lightroom, feel free to contact me. These activities are a daily happening here!
I want to thank two friends, Mark and Phil, for prodding me to resume posting. It’s still going to be slow going for a while because birding-related projects aren’t the only ones on my plate!
