McHugh Creek And Potter March Beat Out Computer Screen

 

I remember as a kid, in the city in LA, there were so many more butterflies than I see nowadays.

Spruce tips.

This robin led me along the trail, presumably away from the nest.  It kept look back to see if I was following.

The nasty thorns of the devil's club shining in the sun, the leaves just opening.

The Arctic Terns are back at Potter Marsh and on high alert when a gull strays into their territory. 

And the swans are passing through.  

And while geese are all around in town, I don't get good opportunities to catch them flying.

Meanwhile. . .

I did check the Supreme Court docket.  There are two new filings today.  Scott Kendall informs the Board he's representing minority Board Members Nicole Borromeo and Melanie Bahnke.  He also asks if the Court won't allow them in as Board members, then they'd like to be  Amicus Curiae.  

Yesterday, Nicole Borromeo file a notice to the Court that the Board's motion asking for a stay and the brief explaining why was illegitimate because the Board never voted to approve it as was their procedure.  She included the vote to have the Board as a whole needed to approve such actions.  

This is starting to seem like the plot of new Netflix drama.  

Terns, Geese, And American Widgeons As I Experiment With the Focus On My Camera At Potter Marsh

Bird pictures -especially birds that aren't very close - have been iffy for the years I've had my Canon EOS Rebel T3i.  With my old film Pentax I could just twist the focus until I got what I needed, but these digital cameras are much more complicated.  Manual focus is not intuitive.  It's worse than that.  And the auto focus simply does not know what precisely I want to focus on when a bird is surrounded by leaves in front and behind.

I gave up on my manual a while back, finding I could usually get clearer instructions via Google and YouTube.  Today I printed out some internet pages on how to manually focus my camera, including some from an online manual, to take to Potter Marsh.  I really wasn't expecting to see the Falcated Duck that was reported still here as of May 30 (and I was right), but I figured it would be a good chance to maybe get closer to learning how to manual focus.  And if you hang out an hour or more there, things happen.

These pics today are better than my last couple of attempts, but some of these birds were relatively close.  The flying pictures came out better than others have.  The one thing I suspect that helped was that I figured out how to pic the spot (in the view finder) the camera uses to focus.  You'll find much more precisely photos all over the internet, and I'm working on that.  But I don't have a 400x lens, and that perfect sharpness isn't necessarily the goal either.

The Terns

Arctic Terns are amazing birds.  The fly from one pole to the other each year.  They're sleek and their black heads and orange beaks and feet contrast sharply with the rest of their white feathers.  And they can hover in one spot - like a hummingbird - before diving to catch a fish.

Geese

American Widgeon

Arctic Terns Potter Marsh At Sunset

 

After a wonderful dinner with friends not far from Potter Marsh, we swung by to see what birds we could find.  Note the official time of sunset tonight in Anchorage was 10:46.  This picture was about ten minutes later.

Here's an arctic tern (as was the first one).  They fly between here and Antarctica and back each year.  They're such beautiful, sleek birds. 

This spot has terns and gulls nesting near each other.  Things were relatively calm, when all of a sudden the birds were all in the air screeching and flying this way and that.

And then I heard the unmistakeable croaking sound of a sandhill crane which flew over me, and I'm guessing disturbed the gulls and terns.  They're huge birds - wing span about 6 feet, probably a little less than bald eagles (though the web shows a variety of wingspans for bald eagles.)

[UPDATE May 18, 2014 noon:  Edgywytch comments below that sandhills eat tern and gull eggs.  The Crane Foundation website linked below says:

"All cranes are omnivorous. Sandhill Cranes are generalists and feed on a wide variety of plant tubers, grains, small vertebrates (e.g. mice and snakes), and invertebrates such as insects or worms. Sandhills find these foods in uplands and in shallow wetlands. Like most cranes, flightless chicks forage primarily on a diet of insects and other protein filled foods during their early stages of rapid growth. The Sandhill's tendency to feed on plant tubers creates conflicts with farming. Sandhill Cranes are adept at probing in the ground and finding planted agricultural seeds such as corn. When large flocks of cranes feed on planted fields, the damage they cause to an unprotected crop can be severe enough to force the farmer to replant the entire field. "]

Sandhill cranes are another great bird we get to see in Alaska.  You can read a lot more about them at the International Crane Foundation website.   I had my telephoto on and finding the bird in my camera and focusing in the fading light was beyond my ability and I'm a little embarrassed by how fuzzy the bird is in the next picture, but it gives you and idea of how big it is.  It's the white horizontal line in the picture.  I'm guessing it's approach is what upset the gulls and terns.  Since its wingspan is close to that of eagles, perhaps they originally thought it might be an eagle.  But that's merely a wild guess  - you'd think they should have learned to distinguish between the two.

It was pretty far away by the time I got this picture - about 11:05 pm.