The Artful Engineer

Well, last week I claimed that this week we would venture to the Oregon coast, but after spending a few hours at Barr Lake State Park I had a lot of bird pictures that I wanted to share. So Oregon will have to wait one more week.

I had not been to Barr Lake before. It’s really a reservoir set in the very flat agricultural land north of the Denver airport. When jets are taking off to the north—which they were during my visit—all the ones turning towards the west are still low enough when they reach the lake to make a lot of noise. Interstate-76 runs along one edge of the lake, too. Despite these apparent disadvantages, there are a crazy amount of birds.

I’m not sure if the image of the red-tailed hawk, above, is my best bird-in-flight image, but it is certainly the most challenging successful one. I cropped it a little vertically, but this is the full width of the frame. With the bird so close and flying towards me, this is very unforgiving, focus-wise. I wish the lit side of its head was towards me instead of the shadowed side, but I guess that’s a quibble.

There is a breeding pair of bald eagles at the lake, but their nest is apparently on the far side of the lake from where I was. (The lake is about 8 miles around; I covered about 3 miles of that perimeter.) I didn’t see the adults, but I did see two juveniles, including this poorly-groomed one.

There were a lot of attractive small birds, as well, including this western kingbird:

Copper is my favorite color, so I find this song sparrow particularly pretty:

I do not recall seeing bullock’s orioles before, but there were quite a few of them. Most were more on the yellow end of the scale, but this one was an amazing orange:

This little guy is (I’m 99% sure) a brown-headed cowbird. The strength of this image is really the composition. The bird’s dark, silhouetted body stands out as the only deep black in the image and the branches frame a patch of blue sky behind it. I think this image would work if it’s head was in shadow, too, but I like the fact that it is lit and more than a simple outline.

There were many Canada geese around. Most families seemed to still have 3-4 young ones with them (5-7 eggs are supposedly the average clutch size) but those numbers will undoubtedly continue to fall as predators take their toll. This gosling’s parents were nearby, but I wouldn’t say it was well-defended.

This final image is a pretty heavy crop (only 5 megapixels of the original 45 remain) and it isn’t perfectly in focus, but you can see the cliff swallow’s mouth open as it is about to catch that insect. I had no idea that the insect was there, of course, until I was looking through the images later to cull the out-of-focus ones. As is my usual practice when photographing birds, I had set my camera for 10 frames per second, but this is one instance where I wish I had doubled that. The reason I don’t, however, is that instead of the 1700 images I ended up with, I would have had twice that many. It takes a long time to go through that many images and most sequences don’t benefit from the extra frame rate. All of that aside, I’ve never made an image like this before and will have to pay more attention to the fact that those birds flying erratically are likely poaching insects out of the sky.

I hope you enjoyed these. Birds are great subjects that you can find pretty much anywhere and photographing them can be a little addictive. But I promise that next week I will stay focused (oof!) on Oregon!