♫ Nazareth your famous son, should have stayed a great unknown, like his father carving wood, he'd have...♪♫
DAMN IT!
Anyway, Del Puerto is a narrow, windy road that wends its way from Patterson/Hwy 5, west to Sunnyvale - or thereabouts. What's great about the road is it's like a mini-Canyon with just the birds, birds & more birds we wanted to see.
Our first stop was to the Owl Arms Condos.
And who, who, whooooo .... you may ask, lives in the Owl Arms Condos?
And there are the other neighbors too, like Ms. Red-tail Hawk who lives only three doors over from the Owl family.
Now here is the big point of the day. Normally I use my 100-400mm Canon lens set up for birdie photos. But on this day, once again I tried using my Kowa spotting scope paired up with my little Powershot Canon for a few digiscope shots. To my amazement, I had the best luck with my digiscoping ever! All the birdie photos above were taken with my digiscope and they came out spectacularly sharp with no black halo (vignetting) at all. Now, if only I can puzzle out how I accomplished the no halo look.
We made several other stops along Del Puerto Road. Don found several birds for his annual birding list. We found a Califoria Thrasher, here via digiscoping:
Of the day's semi-failures was that I was unable, for the life of me, to get any good digiscopes of a beautiful little purple-chinned Costa's Hummingbird. The Costas are really desert hummers and Del Puerto is about as far north as they usual get.
There was time for some wildflowers like this Dense Owl's Clover... Owl's Clover? I didn't make that up.
So now you're thinking I don't like birds anymore? As if.
♫ Tables chairs and oaken chests, would have suited Jesus best...♪♫
Give me strength...
