...Epic!

Another epic goldfinch fight this morning ... they are feisty little birds and altercations like this break out all the time. When I took the feeders out this morning, they started to gather for the morning nosh. I sat quietly inside, Big Daddy at the ready, windows nice and clean ... and I waited. Didn't take long; soon there were at least 10 goldfinches moving in on the feeder...and the fisticuffs (or fisticlaws?) broke out.

This is a shot I've wanted to get for a while, and it's not as crisply focused as I'd like - but it is a good start and I wanted to blip this as a baseline shot for myself. I plan to get a better one at some point.

How I did it... I focused the camera on a bird that was on the feeder then moved the lens slightly to the right of the feeder where I knew there were a few other finches waiting to feed. As soon as one of the finches lifted off, I just held the shutter down and hoped for the best. This image is cropped to about 50% and I used the PS Elements sharpening tool to crisp up the image a little. In the original image, the feeder was visible on the left side of the frame. The D600 lets me go pretty high on ISO, so I had it cranked to 1250 - the image is a little noisy on LARGE but adequate for the internet.

Thanks for sending yesterday's chipmunk to the spotlight! I found a small chipmunk sized hole in the garden between the garden hose housing and the house foundation, exactly where the chipmunks built their "panic room" last year so my guess is that I'll see more chippies as the summer progresses. Yay!

Hubs is having a great time at the racetrack. Today is a no-racing day, so he's catching up on work. Tomorrow and Saturday will be big racing days AND the weather in S. Jersey is looking perfect for the weekend. As for me, I'll be holding down the fort up here, taking pics of anything that moves and a few things that don't.

Oh, BIG NEWS - I saw my first Clearwing Hummingbird Moth today! I was out on the patio for a few minutes and it buzzed up, sipped from the hyacinth and buzzed off - and I didn't have my camera!!! Argh.

xxoo
Debbi