Birding

Yesterday, Saturday, 5/15/10, my wife and I went for a short drive, in an attempt to capture some long curved-beaked shore birds I saw the other morning.
These are not a common sight along US30. We found the birds and shot some images, then sadly they left headed southwest.
On the way back home, my wife reminded me of a WMA (wildlife management area) I found a few years back.
I remembered about where it was, so we went to find it. We found it with little trouble. When we parked along the road and rolled down the windows, the multitude of bird and other sounds was amazing. A few we could recognize, like the Red Winged Blackbird (RWBB)and meadowlarks. But there were some we could not identify at first.

We stayed there, in that spot for some time, listening and shooting pictures.
We drove on east and found a pair of Blue-Winged Teals, and hiding in the rushes was what we later identified as a Green-Backed Heron, she has pictures I was on the wrong side of the vehicle.

We went on east to the next intersection, and proceeded south, stopping,listening and shooting bird images all the way. From this road we saw, Yellow Headed Blackbirds
a ton of Great Tailed Grackles, several more Blue-Winged Teals, some American Coots, some Canada Geese. She caught a glimpse of a Ruddy Duck while he was headed for cover in the reeds, and various other, water foul and shorebirds, we have yet to ID.

Simply an amazing array if life.

By the way the long curved-beaked shore birds,I mentioned earlier ended up being White-Faced Ibis, probably just passing through.

For more information on the location of the WMA/wetland. Leave me a message

SketchUp and Kerkythea

It must be that time again for me to update my blog. A few weeks ago I found a wonderful 3D rendering program, and a plugin to export projects from SketchUp, and do a very realistic image of those projects. There is a multitude of materials available for Ketkythea (KT) these include various metals, glasses and lighting (illuminants).
I have included one image into this posting there are many more I have been working on, mostly experimenting with the lighting items.

new video link

Sparrows for lunch...

Once again we had a Sharp-Shinned Hawk, in our backyard. I did shoot some video I will upload it when I can.