Patience is a Virtue or Spring is Here

I just finished a lunch of leftover asparagus stir fry and my nose is running and my eyes were watering. Isn't it funny how all the spices like chunks of chiles,garlic and ginger get left behind when people are serving themselves from the frying pan. All those spicy things get left behind to seriously spice up the one serving of leftovers put into the fridge. My that was hot!

Well I spent the morning photographing Red Winged Blackbirds at a local lake. A friend of Lenore's has her own private lake. OK well it's not all hers as she does have to share it with the other property owners. In any case she gave me permission to go out and take pictures. So this morning I loaded up the kayak and headed out onto the water. Naturally her two dogs seemed to want to come too as I had to push one of them off of me and out of the kayak as I started to back out onto the water!

Well spring has definitely sprung as the blackbirds were finding high spots around the lake and calling out to establish their nesting territories. The problem was that in most cases this was in the tall willows bordering the lake and not in the cattails and bullrushes along the edges. So I meandered down the lake looking for potential subjects. Finally I found two blackbirds that were fairly close together on top of some cattails in a corner of the lake. But when I set up to shoot some images of them they took off and flew to the other end of the lake. No luck there.

I then proceeded to explore the inlet to the lake taking numerous dead end paths up into the tules. On the way back down the lake I noticed the black birds returning. This time I slowly paddled back into the area where I had seen them land and I parked the kayak right up into an opening in the tules. I just sat and waited for about twenty minutes.

My patience was rewarded because two of the blackbirds climbed up onto the top of the cattails and began calling. I slowly backed up to where I was clear and began shooting trying to capture one of the birds calling with its wing patches out on display. In the end I took over a hundred exposures. So my job right now is to whittle them down and keep only the best ones and trash the rest so as to not overwhelm the limited storage space on my hard drive.


God's light and love to all,

chris