Anne Elliott's photos with the keyword: suet

Yesterday evening, 31 March 2019, four friends and I arrived back in Calgary after an amazing 13-day birding trip to southern Texas! This morning, I grabbed four photos to give an idea of what kinds of things we saw - four of my better photos, I should add : ) As usual, for me, it was not a trip to photograph just birds, but to capture anything else of interest, of beauty. This included flowers, insects, a few fungi, wild animals, and so on. As always, I missed quite a few of the birds that were seen by my friends. They are excellent birders and spend so much time birding and taking photos, and so are able to spot and capture the tiniest, fastest of birds. I am happy to have seen every bird that I did see! Everything from Whooping Cranes down to a small Yellow-throated Warbler. Unlike on our trip to Ontario and Quebec last year, we were thrilled to see Northern Cardinals close enough to photograph this holiday. Right now, I can't remember names of places, and I have a huge amount of getting organized with where and when I saw most things. However, I just wanted to let you know I am home, feeling back to being motivated to take photos again, after totally losing interest the last few weeks before we left on this exciting trip. I used both my old Canon SX60 and my less old Nikon P900 on this trip. The advantage of the P900 is that it has GPS and automatically loads on the map on Flickr. It may not always give an accurate location, but hopefully it will be close enough. Part way through the holiday, it looked like the Canon was taking somewhat better photos than the newer Nikon, so I was using the Canon as my main camera. First things first, though - I need a mug of coffee and some breakfast before I download the rest of my images to my computer. Such a mixed bag - some reasonable shots and others just about as bad as they could possibly be, but will post them on Flickr for the record. Once again, I will post photos in very roughly the order in which they were taken, to help give me a much better idea of just where we went and what we saw and when.

Mountain Chickadees are birds that I so rarely get to see. We always seem to be in luck on this Bird Count, though. All four photos posted this morning were taken on 27 December 2018, when I took part with seven others (in two vehicles) in the annual Audubon Sheep River/Turner Valley Christmas Bird Count. The weather forecast was for sun and cloud, but there was only a very brief sighting of sun on the distant mountain peaks in the whole day. Heavily overcast is an accurate description. Fortunately, it was not bitterly cold (between -11C and -3C) and there was no deep snow to have to walk through. We only saw 13 species of bird, but we were all delighted to see a Moose (female), with two being seen by one participant. I think I only got photos of two birds in the whole day - plus a fake owl on a barn door, that I like to photograph each year : ) Two days later, I had to be up really early to get to a meeting place by 7:30 am, ready for the annual Audubon Cochrane Wildlife Reserve Christmas Bird Count. This was my last out-of-city Count for this winter. There is a Fish Creek Park annual New Year's Day Count coming up, so hopefully there won't be any new snow before then. It did snow a bit yesterday.