Hummingbird Day in Madera Canyon

I'm posting a day behind again because the internet here crawls and seems to only be reliable until about 4:00 pm. I decided that today would be strictly a day to shoot hummingbirds.  I was having a lot of trouble focusing with my 55-250mm lens but I was successful in getting several different species.

The blip is a Female Broad-billed.  It was probably the sharpest in flight shot of the day.  The first extra is was was known as a Magnificent hummingbird but the name has been changed to ravioli Rivoli's.  The next two extras are the same species of the blip.  The one in flight I love because the eye is visible through the wings and the second is one of my birds on a stick all puffy and cute.

A lovely day which started out pretty windy so I wore a denim shirt over my tee but was shed after lunch.  I ate it outside the casita in the warmth of the sun and read for a while.  I did most all of my photography in the morning.  Later in the day, I took my little binoculars to the wildlfe area, picked out a seat in the sun and spent that time relaxing.

The most humorous part of the day was when the gent who was standing next to me showed me a shot on his camera, the first thing I said was that his battery was really low.  He was stunned that I caught it.  That's when I told whispered that I wasn't a birder, I was a photographer.  "I figured," he laughed. 

I was dead tired and decided to have a bunch of fruit for dinner and hit the sack early.  It turned out to be a terrific day.  Enjoy the hummingbirds.

Thursday afternoon:  I'm heading out now with the bigger lens.  I'm hoping a few things I saw while I was a pretend birder show up.  A few of them I have never gotten before, like a Gray hawk, a Pine siskin, and a couple of LBB's (little brown birds).