Category Archives: wildlife

Backyard Wildlife Addition of a Frog

How many different animals have I photographed in our backyard? In a time when we haven’t been able to travel to see much, having stuff come to us has been quite a benefit. This addition was a total surprise. I had taken the sun shade out from where it was stored beside the house and, when I put it up, I realized it was pretty grubby and needed a clean. I moved it to an open patch of grass and washed it down. When I got back to the table, I realized it had been housing a frog that had dropped on to the table when I opened the shade up. I grabbed the camera quickly before it disappeared. It actually hung around longer than I expected and I even tried to start focus stacking but it then got a little mobile and I gave up on that.

It leapt off the table and on to the grass where I got a couple more shots before letting it head off to wherever it felt like taking cover. The green and gold colors were really pretty vibrant. I am not a frog expert but I did Google it. I think there is a fair chance that it is a Pacific Tree Frog. Anyone know anything better?

A Casual Passerby in the Backyard

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While sitting on the deck one afternoon, I was fortunate to have the camera to hand. As I looked across to our back fence, I saw a raccoon walking along the top of the fence between the two houses behind us. He seemed totally uninterested in our presence and walked to our fence and then turned left to wander across the back our our house and our neighbors’ houses. I had a long lens on and he was too close for a while to fit him all in. Along the fence he went and then disappeared from view. First time I have seen a raccoon around here but probably not the last. What other wildlife will visit us?

Rufous Versus Anna’s Hummingbirds

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We have plenty of hummingbirds visiting our back yard. They may look different depending on the angle the light hits their feathers but up until recently I had thought that they were all the same species – the Anna’s hummingbird. Then we got a visitor that seemed different. First, instead of having a grey look to the feathers, it was a lot more brown. The other difference was the sound of the wingbeats. Instead of the whirring noise we were used to, this one had a higher pitched sound almost like a click as the wings were hitting each other. It sounded quite distinctive. I trip to my big book of birds suggests that these may be Rufous hummingbirds. For the birders amongst you, I hope you will advise if I am mistaken.

Backyard Rabbits Are My Current Wildlife Photography Subject

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When looking for wildlife photography opportunities, the one thing I have close to home at the moment is the local rabbit population. We get a steady stream of these guys coming through the back yard and eating what could loosely pass for grass in my yard. We get some bigger buns and there are some tiny looking ones that I assume are young rather than a different breed. They are usually pretty jumpy so getting shots is not always easy but a couple of them seem pretty relaxed with me showing up.

Stranger to Our Backyard

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We have plenty of wildlife in our backyard. We get a variety of birds visiting. Recently, while sitting out on the deck, we had a new visitor. I am not an expert on birds but I do have a very big book with lots of pictures of them. There are so many that it is easy to pick the wrong one but I think this one was a Steller’s Jay. It stayed around for a couple of minutes before flying off. If you are knowledgeable about birds and I am wrong, please feel free to let me know what it actually is.

Spider Hiding Out

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My effort at shooting macro images of bees in our front yard (this post) also yielded a surprised. While I was waiting on a flower for the bee to come to me, I noticed the flower already had a resident. A little white spider was hanging out in there. I am not sure what its intended prey was. It seemed a bit small to take on a bee but I have no idea if that could happen. Maybe it wanted something smaller. I got a couple of shots of it that interested me. The prime shots show its “face” in detail. Macro shots have a very shallow depth of field so I missed with plenty of shots but one or two had the end of the legs in focus. The detail of the hairs on the legs was so cool so I include that too even if it looks like I missed focus on the shot (which obviously I did!).

Bees at Work

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The Puget Sound area is currently abloom. Everywhere you look there are flowers. It is quite beautiful. We haven’t seen too many hummingbirds on our feeder recently and it’s not hard to see why when they have so many places to feed right now. We have some blooms in our front yard too and this means the bees are visiting. I decided to try and use the macro lens to get some shots of them. My lens is a Tokina unit. I bought it for the negative scanning process for which it worked well. However, the focusing drive is not fantastic and it hunts a bit when I use it for things other than manual mode. However, it is still worth a shot. Here are a couple of bee shots from the yard. I can’t go anywhere so I may as well shoot at home!

Airport Birds

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The viewing deck at Haneda is not a place I had gone to photograph wildlife. However, despite the usual concerns about birds and planes not mixing well, there were a lot of small birds that seemed to be hanging out on the roof of the terminal buildings. I imagine the number of visitors to the viewing decks means there will be crumbs of some sort for them to feed on. They were pretty close to the people but just the other side of the fencing. I guess they knew they were safe.

Geese Washing Themselves in the Sammamish

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I’ve been catching up on some video editing while stuck indoors. During the Christmas break, mum and I took a walk along the Sammamish River. There were lots of geese floating downstream and they were busy washing themselves. This involved a lot of flapping and inverting themselves in the river. Of course, when I got close, they stopped doing it while their buddies further downstream seemed to be busy washing. I did finally get some footage of it so here is a short video of geese! Bet that’s just what you wanted to see today!

Deer in Yorkshire a Couple of Decades Ago

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More from the negative scan archive. Another hike we were taking and this time the wildlife is a little larger. This herd of deer was grazing nearby and there were some impressive sets of antlers on display for some of them. One stag was staring in our direction briefly so I got a nice head on shot. The scan of the negative with my 40D seems to have come out pretty well.