H.J. Ruiz – Avian101 – Page 906 – "My Backyard Visitors" – All about birds

Turkeys and Thanksgiving

If there’s a bird I don’t want to talk about today is the Turkey! Thanksgivings meals are going to make me blow up!

Yesterday, Lucy, Tyler and I went to have the Thanksgiving dinner at our niece’s home in Alpharetta, Lucy baked the turkey, made a delicious spinach pie, Mediterranean style noodle salad, yams with pineapple and coleslaw. This other friend made broccoli casserole, and a corn kernels on a creamy sauce slightly spicy and mashed potato. We had cranberry-gravy ( Gravy mixed with cranberry paste) and cranberry sauce mixed with orange. For dessert we had apple pie, pumpkin pie and a delicious cranberry cheesecake! I called it Cranberry Day! I love cranberry and all what I have mentioned was made with fresh cranberries.

Now imagine that all these meals came after the ors deouvres and wine. I ate too much!

Every year I promise to eat in moderation but last minute I forget! 🙂

Everything I ate was delicious and felt very satisfied. We of course gave thanks for a blessed year that we had. Especially Lucy and I for having our loving Tyler with us.

Today, instead of turkey pictures I’m posting photos of Tyler. G-d bless him!

Tyler (18 months old)

Tyler

Tags: birds, important information

New MacBook Pro and birds

This is the time of the year when birds become kind of scarce in areas where I live. So I have to resort to my photo archives. I picked some photos of local birds and included is one photo that I shot yesterday. The past few days I’ve been busy migrating part of the content from my old MacBook lap top to my new MacBook Pro. Then I gave my Macbook to my wife and she gave me her IMac. Now you can imagine all I had to do in order to transfer and organize all my files, programs and a myriad of folder I kept for my other personal stuff.

Thank G-d all went well, I’m using the IMac exclusively for Photography with thousands of photos organized in folders. Later I bought a LaCie Drive 500 GB for extra photos and the newest files are in my new MacBook Pro. All my programs are in good working condition. I lost a few programs for being outdated but I bought new ones now accepted by the latest Mac OS.

Lucy is happy now and I’m happy too!

Last night we had many weather warnings for Tornado watch! Luckily we experienced only heavy rain, thunders and fairly strong winds. I don’t mind those but I never wish to experience a tornado!

Here are the photos for today:

: Juvenile Northern Mockingbird

: King Bird

: Red-winged Blackbird (M)

: European Starling taking a bath

: Northern Mockingbird – Shot taken yesterday

Tags: birds, photography, photos of birds

Driving back Home

Driving back home, returning from our short vacation in Tybee Island, I made a stop on the side of the road near the Savannah River. I was curious to see why other cars where parked there. The sign indicated that there’s a bikers and hikers trail and fishing area. I saw some people there for running and others on bikes.Then I got more interested when I saw a White Egret flying by and landed somewhere in a marsh. While trying to find the egret I saw some what looked liked like vultures circling high in the air. I shot a series of pictures, I felt good to capture them in flight. Later I found that they were 2 kinds of vultures, Turkey Vulture and a lifer for me: the Black Vulture.

I walked toward my vehicle when I took a look back and I see this fairly large birds flapping his wings flying low parallel to the row of cypress trees along the side of the trail. I got my camera back from my bag and I saw the bird already perched on top of a tree. There was some distance but I shot the camera just in case, then I walked toward the trees but the bird just took off!

I believe this bird is a juvenile Bald Eagle. What do you think?

Juvenile Bald Eagle?

Tags: birds, photography, photos of birds

HJ’s Other Photos

I know that my blog is dedicated to “All about Birds” but let’s not forget that if you are a photographer you will always think like one. Birds is my theme but I see many other things that I photograph while pursuing my goal to shoot birds. From every place I’ve been I have many shots that are let’s say “my private stock”. I’d like to share some of those shots starting today. I will call them “HJ’s other photos”. I love to share my photos. Fell free to comment! :). All the photos for today’s post were taken in Georgia’s Tybee Island.