Here are a few more photos taken in the Methow Valley on June 13, 2013.

First up is a female Red-winged blackbird, a bird that looks nothing like its male mate.  In the non-breeding season the sexes usually separate into their own flocks, pairing off again in the early spring.

Female Red-Winged Blackbird

A male Red-naped sapsucker removing cavity materials from an active nest…

Two unidentified fly-catchers.  Some flycatchers are identifiable only by vocalizations, far beyond my capabilities!

This, I believe, is a Warbling vireo…

And finally, another Cedar waxwing…

This concludes photos from the Methow Valley.  My original intent was to return to yard birds I photographed immediately after returning from the trip east of the mountains, but I had a rather bountiful day in the yard yesterday (July 3) and I’ll probably publish some of those photos next.

One of the highlights of the expedition, both this year and last, were a pair of Red-naped sapsuckers nesting in a tree along Beaver Pond.  This year they were in the same tree as last year, but this hole appears fresh and I think it is a few feet lower than the one they used last year… more about that in a minute.  The birds made repeated trips to the nest hole, bringing in insects and taking out wood shavings.

Female Red-Naped Sapsucker

Male Red-Naped Sapsucker

There were several House wrens around the pond and it was difficult for me to tell whether, over the course of several hours, I was observing one, a pair or more than one pair.  There was often one singing… presumably a male.

One of the pair of House wrens appeared that they might have a nest in the hole used by the sapsuckers last year, but House wrens are notorious for building more than one nest and for dismantling the nesting materials of other birds, both of which behaviors I have observed in my yard this year.

When we reached Washington Pass on the way over to the Methow Valley (Winthrop) we encountered a significant flock of Gray jays and Clark’s nutcrackers…. with ideal photographic conditions.

Clark’s Nutcracker

Clark’s Nutcracker

Gray Jay

Once in the Methow Valley we saw at least three, and possibly four, species of flycatchers.  Unfortunately some of these flycatchers are identifiable only through hearing their vocalizations (or DNA testing!) so I am unsure of the exact species.  However I was able to identify an Olive-sided flycatcher (not pictured).

Unidentified flycatcher 1

Unidentified flycatcher 1

Unidentified flycatcher 2

On the morning of Sun, June 9 I looked out our kitchen window and saw several hummingbirds in the yard.  This wasn’t unusual, but they seemed very interested in our watercourse and I saw more than one landing on ‘staging sticks’ I have positioned near the watercourse.  As I watched I also saw what was obviously a Golden-crowned kinglet in the watercourse, but it was significantly different from any I had ever seen.  It was lacking its signature golden crown.  But there was no mistaking the bird’s identity.

I grabbed my camera and headed out to the yard.  Before the dust had settled I had taken about 70 photos of the bird.  Unfortunately just about the time I got set up clouds rolled in and I had to shoot in poorer light (and therefore reduced shutter speeds) than I would have liked.  However I managed to keep too many photos… maybe 12-15 of the best.  And before it was over I realized that there were actually two of the juvenile kinglets in the yard.

We usually only see kinglets in the extended winter months, so this sighting means that there was a breeding pair somewhere in the greater neighborhood.  (There was no sigh of the parents, but the juveniles seemed to be doing very well on their own.)

Just to relieve the monotony I’m throwing in this photo of a Spotted towhee who had just taken a bath and was busy preening. 

On my last morning in Texas I attempted to install a 1.7X tele-converter on my camera which would give me additional magnification for my photography.  I had a problem with my bayonet mount on my camera and found that not only could I not install the tele-converter, but I could no longer get my Nikkor 200-400mm lens to lock on the camera… and the automatic focus would not work.  (I later discovered that my camera had apparently been damaged when putting it, with the large lens attached, into the overhead bin in the plane while using a new transport case.  (This was a very expensive lesson!!!)

The day after arriving back home I was back in Seattle again to see about getting the camera repaired.  After leaving the camera I sauntered over to the sales end of the business to ask a few questions and ended up purchasing a Nikon D7100 to replace the D300S I was sending back to Nikon.  The new camera operates at 24-megapixels… twice the resolution of the old camera and I’ve had excellent results.  However it means that I will be facing additional storage problems since I try to keep all of my digital images on my notebook (with external hard drive backup).  So since about May 25, 2013 I’ve had a new, improved camera and all the photos you see posted on my blog from now on will have been taken with it.

And the male House sparrow pictured above is not without significance.  A large percentage of the birds in my yard consist of House sparrows, Pine siskins and Amercian goldfinches.  I have a lot of other visitors, but they are often difficult to pick out from the crowd.  And you might think that I would grow weary of photographing a bird that I, and many others, consider a ‘trash bird’.  However I just can’t stop photographing any birds and I gradually learn not only more about the birds but also about photography.  And sometimes a photograph is just plain, blind luck!

You’ll get to see a lot of what I consider relatively rare yard birds in the coming posts, but this photograph  of the sparrow just reminds me that there’s always something to appreciate, even in the relatively mundane.  I consider this one of the better of probably several hundred photos of House sparrows that I have.  This bird had taken a bath only a short time previously and was in the process of adjusting its feathers when I snapped the photo.  And if you enlarge the photo by clicking on it you can see some of the detail I obtain with the new camera.