I’m learning so much more about birds lately.

The birds I was most interested in growing up were birds of prey, and that carried into when I took up photography last time. Part of this is that they’re large enough that you don’t need a very long lens to capture them. Thanks to the new camera and lens, I’m able to get much better photos than before. Many of these are cropped to some degree to get a good composition, but still – I’m seeing them much closer than ever before, and so smaller birds are easier to chase.

Because of that, I’ve been looking them up in bird identification guides. Birds with names I recognize, but couldn’t name at sight are suddenly so much more familiar to me now that I’ve had time to photograph them.

Today, I saw house finches, carolina wrens, cedar waxwings, a female downy woodpecker, and a few more things that I didn’t manage to capture quite yet. In particular, blue jays are proving to be real bastards. They make a racket when they see me, scaring off all the other birds, and they don’t like to come out into the open enough for me to get a good shot. I will take great satisfaction from finally capturing a decent photo of a jay.