Memorial Day and more birds June 2023
Memorial Day was absolutely gorgeous. Pleasantly cool and sunny. Vic performed Flanders Field for the ceremony at Town Hall. Well done!
After the ceremony, Emily went back home to stitch, Vic hung out with friends, and I walked around with my camera. Earlier that day, I woke with the sunrise to attempt some bird photography. Total bust, didn’t get even one decent shot. However, just wandering around with my camera proved much more fruitful. Bumped into an Egret by town hall, and then another on the Massasoit bridge.
I also spent some time on the Hampden Meadows Greenbelt over the holiday weekend.
One day during the week, I grabbed my camera at lunch time and headed for the Massasoit bridge. I spotted a large bird that I thought was a hawk. After processing the photos I discovered it was a Turkey Vulture. Not a pretty bird, but impressive.
As it flew, it was being harassed by a red-wing black bird.
On that same lunch break, I got a few shots of more Egrets (the place is lousy with ‘em) and some gulls, and a Cormorant (at a distance).
The first weekend in June, I tooled around with Sprocket and got some more bird shots. A couple keepers of the osprey on Hundred Acre Cove, and some tiny swallows (or swifts?) eating bugs on Kent St. pond. Those little guys were a challenge to shoot. They fly so fast and erratically that it at first seemed impossible to both track them and obtain focus. Pretty quickly I gave up on trying to use autofocus and just set manual focus to a spot in the pond. Whenever the birds would fly near the focal plane, and fire of a burst of pics. Managed to nab a few keepers (out of >100 exposures).
