outdoor photography

You Tube Slide Show of My Favorite Bird Photos from 2014 (a work in progress) It's been a pretty great year for birding for me.  I'm especially happy with my results for Seminole County (details for this will be in a future post), but I had my best birding year yet.  And I also had a few trips up north (Boston, Philly), one to California, and one to Mexico. These were not birding trips, but they still allowed me to get several more lifers than I would have had otherwise. Glaucous Guill Lifers are harder to come by now that I have well over 300 species in the state of Florida, but that's okay, I'm not complaining.  It makes the challenge all the more fun.  Here's my list of lifers from 2014: Western Tanager:    Lake Apopka North Shore Restoration Area, FL (01 Jan 2014)   Common Eider: Jetty Park, FL (04 Jan 2014) Western Gull: San Diego, CA (17 Mar 2014) California Towhee: San Diego, CA (17 Mar 2014) Lesser Goldfinch: San Diego, CA (...

Glaucous Gull A few days ago I drove up to Daytona Beach in the afternoon to look for gulls.  An Iceland Gull and a Glaucous Gull had been seen the day before, and we were hoping to find them.  The Iceland Gull eluded us, but the Glaucous Gull was very easy to find near a headless Herring Gull.  This bird has come much farther south than it should have, but I'm not complaining. Glaucous Gull Well, there were other birds there too, though not as many as there were a few weeks ago, when it was estimated that 60,000 gulls were lining the shoreline every evening.  I suspect that when we were there, there were well less than 5,000 gulls along the 1.5 mile stretch of beach that we walked. Lesser Black-backed Gull Ring-billed Gull And there were even a few shorebirds around, mostly Willets, Black-bellied Plovers, Ruddy Turnstones, and Sanderlings. Willet