Nest Update

Daugh­ter told me today she hadn’t seen the Jun­cos in a cou­ple of days so I peered into the nest to check on it. This is what I found. 

Filed under photography | Comment (0)

Juncos and Sigmas

This female Slate-colored Junco has decided along with her mate that it was a good idea to make a nest to nur­ture her baby birds in one of my fern plants hang­ing in our car­port. Daugh­ter and I dis­cov­ered the dad and mom mak­ing the nest sev­eral weeks ago and tried to relo­cate it but they came back and built another nest in the same plant. At that point, I fig­ured it futile to pur­sue mov­ing it again and far be it for me to deny a momma a nice, warm place to tend to her young. I gave up and con­tin­ued to water my ferns as usual until one day I dis­turbed the momma in one of my three ferns. The next day I went out to check on the nest to see what was in it: eggs or baby birds.

I spied feath­ers and a foot all the while mak­ing both mom and dad very mad as they were chirp­ing at me from a nearby tree. It makes it very dif­fi­cult if not impos­si­ble to water this fern because I am afraid of hurt­ing the hatch­lings and mak­ing momma and dada too mad or, worst case, prompt them to aban­don the nest. Every time any­one goes out­side now they begin their defen­sive click­ing chirps. I cap­tured this photo while out­side watch­ing the kids play on their swings which is right near the nest.

I took this with the 400mm f5.6 lens I inher­ited from my Dad. It is very, very old and I think it may have dust or dirt in it as pic­tures come out sort of faded and hazy most of the time. I plan to send it away to a Sigma repair cen­ter for a good clean­ing. I tried to take it apart to clean it myself but just ended up strip­ping one of the screws so I will now leave it to the pros. Hope­fully, the cost will be rea­son­able and the time it takes, zippy as I will miss it.

Speak­ing of lenses, one of the other lens I inher­ited from my dad is a Sigma APO MACRO 180mm 1:2.8. It will not work with my rebel XTI and I found out last week after call­ing Sigma that it can­not be rechipped to work with my cam­era because they no longer make the chips for it, as the lens was dis­con­tin­ued over ten years ago. It was made some­time between 1991–1997 and it is in excel­lent con­di­tion. My Dad loved his Sigma lenses and took great care of all his equip­ment. I am bummed a lit­tle because I really like tak­ing macro shots but I do have his 35mm Canon EOS ELAN cam­era body which it will work with. So when­ever I get a chance to take a class where I will need a film cam­era I will have an awe­some macro lens to shoot with.

Filed under photography | Comment (0)

More Photos

My pho­tog­ra­phy gallery has been updated with some recent pic­tures as well as some older pho­tos. You might be able to tell that I am really enjoy­ing tak­ing pic­tures of all the var­i­ous birds return­ing to the area.

Filed under photography, spring | Comment (0)