denise

I used my zoom lens to capture this picture of a Nuthatch in a local wetland park.  I was sitting on a bench looking for birds and happened to notice this bird on the bench beside me.  My Zoom was not going to get this shot.  Any way the bird flew away to a bridge post and stayed around long enough for me to get a few shots. This one taken  at f 5.6 1/250 ISO 800.  It was a day full of clouds with sunny breaks, and wooded I found it a challenge getting the right settings in manual mode.  I did a bit of photo editing, cropping.

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I am fortunate to live fairly close to a large River in my hometown.  This time of the year there are lots of gulls, Mallards, and other variety of ducks.  I am usually on a mission to get photos of as many as I can.  A couple of days ago I was hoping that I might see a cormorant, and to be honest I wasn't completely sure if it might be too early.  Any way to my delight there was this lone Double Crested Cormorant with a traveling companion.  It was quite a distance away, swimming down the river, so I was only able to identify the other bird after taking the picture with my zoom lens.  Turned out to be a Surf Scoter (as best I can tell after consulting Merlin and my Bird ref).  Calm waters, I think around 10 am and not many other birds, ducks, gulls around.  These two traveled down the river for quite a while together. As an aside, when I took the picture I was on a walking bridge over the river and as I brought my camera over the railing, my lens hood was nudged off so down the bank and into the river it went.