Hey guys, so you may have noticed that for the last 5 weeks I’ve had A LOT of owl photos… and as much fun as it is, I’ve been missing color. The owl photos are so brown and sand colored, I’m missing greens and blues!

I’m interrupting our regularly scheduled OwlWatch for a bit of another bird watch… namely a Hummingbird.

I’m coming to find out that as nice as a perfect portrait of a bird is… I actually like the photos that show some of the personality, or those ‘Oh, I didn’t know that bird could do that’ photos… which is what I have for my show-and-tell today.

I was watching this Hummingbird wiggle about on their favorite branch (I’ve been fortunate to see this little one on this branch over several days now) and I was thinking, wow this bird really feels comfortable enough to preen while I’m photographing it. I had a hummingbird feeder on my balcony for years and I didn’t get to see them preen… I guess because they were always dive-bombing each other to get to the big red flower. Anyway, I thought it was interesting. And when I got home and could see the images on a much larger screen, I found it even more interesting…

Did you know that a Hummingbird can turn their head this far? I didn’t… He¹ is touching his back with his long beak, incredible!

I’m also a fan of silly… so when I look at these photos I think of how I feel before my first cup of coffee…

OwlWatch Update:

I have been getting footage nearly every day of the Owls, but it takes time to cull the photos and edit the video. And I still need to learn the color correction portion of DaVinci Resolve before I can finish the edit of the next set of video so that we can see what’s happening in the shadows of the cave… so I’d better get to it.

Until next time…

~nic

¹ – I’m pretty sure this is a male Anna’s Hummingbird, due to the mask on his face that looks black unless the light hits it just right and then it looks red. Female Anna’s Hummingbirds do not have this mask.