CFFC: Birds

It is no secret that I enjoy nature. When given the opportunity, I tend to include animals or plants in my photos. Birds are particularly interesting to me, especially since I come across so many different ones. I also tend to have a lot more bird photos than other animal pictures, because the larger mammals that I love are harder to capture for photos.

For this week’s challenge, Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge – Birds, I am sharing some of my more recent bird photos. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I took a lot of photos this past weekend, and yes, quite a few birds were included.

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Not all of my bird photos come from the wild–although, I wish they did! Here are some of my bird photos from San Diego Safari Park that I have not shared yet.

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One of my favorite experiences at the safari park happened when the zookeepers had a crane fly down from a ridge to the grass area in front of my table at a restaurant. Apparently, this crane is the zoo’s ambassador and has been trained to walk around and show off in front of guests. I had no idea this crowned crane was so big before she came down to our area; you can appreciate her wingspan in the photos of her flight and landing.

I have an affinity for hummingbirds, too. I have a couple of all-natural feeders in my yard, and I am always on the hunt for garden flowers that attract hummingbirds. Hummingbirds are super fast, so it has taken a bit of practice for me to capture their details with my camera. Here a few that I have not shared before.

This next bird is very loud, but beautiful-sounding. I came across him during a hike. Needless to say, my hike took much longer than normal, because I had to take photos. I think this is a male, but there’s not much difference in color between males and females. It seemed to me that he was serenading a smaller female bird nearby.

Not to be outdone by the thrasher’s loudness, this bird makes his own loud sounds while he drills holes in a tree. There were at least six of these woodpeckers in one tree at the park, where they worked together as a group to store their bounty of communally shared acorns.