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| Slate-Throated Redstart at Pine Lake Park, San Francisco |
An email group for local birders has been blowing up the past couple of days with sightings of a bird that's common in the tropics, but not so much in San Francisco: the slate-throated redstart. I don't often try to photograph these special sightings, but this time I thought the bird was not only too cool-looking to pass up, but had the added bonus of being fairly close to where I live.
I envied the other birders who had larger-format cameras, with more acute autofocus and higher ISO capabilities than my little FZ80. The redstart was energetic in its movements, zipping from branch to branch in the blink of an eye. After snapping a shot, the FZ80's viewfinder has to pause for half an eternity while the image is written to the SD card. Meanwhile, the bird has flitted off to another branch. Now I have to find the bird again, then point the camera in its general direction, find it in the viewfinder, get it in focus, and if the bird is still there after all that, I can finally fire off another shot.
Yeah, yeah. Excuses, excuses. Although I didn't get anything great, I'm grateful to have gotten anything at all!
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| When I first arrived, the redstart had recently been seen but was currently out of sight, so I zeroed in on some of the other bird life in the vicinity. I liked that the hummingbird was on a branch of such a classic hummer-flower as this fuchsia. |
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| This Wilson's warbler was also very hard to photograph as it furiously flitted from branch to branch in search of insects to feed its noisily cheeping youngster. |
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| Here's the youngster. |
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| Another youngster was this pied-billed grebe, which was cheeping incessantly and is seen here trying to get its mother to chuck up a beakful of Pine Lake chowder. |
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| Seeking the Slate-Throated Redstart at Pine Lake Park |
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| Peek-a-Boo |
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| Foraging in the Foliage |
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| Since I'd only photographed a black-throated gray warbler once before, I wasn't totally sure that's what this was until I got confirmation from the other birders. |
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| I stopped by Grandview Park on my way to Pine Lake, hoping I might find Grandview Gus still in residence. This young red-tailed hawk flew in and landed on a street lamp just as I arrived near Gus's burrow, so it's probably just as well that Gus wasn't out and about. That bit of hair stuck to the hawk's beak might have come from a recent meal. The hawk tried to scrape it off on its metal perch, but without success. |
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| I didn't have to wait long for it to take flight once again on this windy day. This shot is a composite of two frames. |
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| I saw this black oystercatcher from the Cliff House on Wednesday. It was foraging on the big rock closest to Sutro Baths, where I'd never seen one before. |
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| Turns out the Kitty Kat, which I've seen before from my Cliff House aerie, is a whale-watching vessel. |
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| I hadn't noticed this old-school fishing boat out there before, and it didn't show up on my VesselFinder app, but its name, KVINS, was easy enough to read. According to this Facebook page, you can pre-order fish to pick up fresh from the boat at Pier 45 along Fisherman's Wharf. |
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