Three (more) Cheers for Anna

I may be accused of wringing this one dry but here goes. Ok we all know that I was recently in San Diego and it was work but strangely the Festival did not start till 11:00am each morning so that gave me plenty of time to go birding in the local area around Mission Bay. One morning I just walked around Mission Bay and up towards the Hyatt Regencey Hotel. Western, Ring-billed, Heermans & California Gull  kept me occupied along with American Crow. On the water were American Coot, Blue-winged Teal, American Wigeon, Bufflehead, Brant and Pacific Diver. At one point a flock of 60 Black Slimmers were flushed from their roost. I've just noticed the typo and of course I meant Black Skimmers, but if I was as talented or imaginative (read as weird) as perhaps Tom McKinney  then I'd go off on a tangent about 5 dozen African American overweight people being woke up from their slumbers on a Californian beach. But I'm not and I wouldn't know where to take the analogy further.

So I eventually got to the Hyatt Regencey Hotel gardens and this one Anna's Hummingbird kept coming back to the same perch and allowed me to get very close to it. I only had a 300mm lens with me but I was able to get a number of frame-filling pictures of the bird. It even allowed me to walk around it and change the background from whiteout sky to a diffuse green of the shrubbery behind it. It was amazing to watch as the colours of the gorget changed from plain black to iridescent reddish-gold to purple and red.

Catch Up

The last few weeks have been chaotic and I have only just finished editing the full res images from Thailand and California so I thought I'd post some images from west coast USA. My camera died on this trip that was a work trip but not before getting some new 'Digi-ticks' as well as connecting with some decent west coast birds. Every tree seemed to have an Audubon's warbler in and the car park of the hotel had Song Sparrow, Savannah Sparrow, Black Phoebe, Say's Pheobe, Anna's Hummingbird as well as Cassin's Kingbird. The Kingbird has the Latin name Tyrannus vociferans and it was not hard to see why, very noisy and birds and were heard long before I found them. The Black Phoebe were catching a large number of Painted Lady butterflies. I had them checked out by an 'invert man' at the San Diego Bird Festival and they are the same Painted Lady that we get here in Europe. The Brewer's Blackbirds fed in amongst the American Coot on the lawn of the hotel near the swimming pool and were there each morning before breakfast.  Black Crowned Night Heron fed on the same lawn next to the hot tub at night before roosting out on yachts in the marina during the daytime.