Birbs of Saskatchetoon - Yellow Warbler

 The day after I went for the ride with Keiran and saw the Vultures and Osprey and Purple Martins, Amanda and I went for a ride on the tandem out to the Chappell Marsh Conservation Area. 

Amanda brought the fancy new camera we bought for Finnegan to use for his Photography class last term. She's been hounding me to take it with me as it is... well.. new and fancy. I do like the handiness of my little camera that fits in my pocket and can be deployed in seconds and... takes reasonably good photos - good enough that you can sometimes recognize what I was trying to take a picture of... it certainly zooms better than the phone camera! 

I feel like she kind of brought it along to SHOW ME how much better it is. And... she's... not wrong... 

Anyway, as we arrived Amanda said she saw a Yellow Warbler in a bush! She'd been saying she thought she saw one or heard one for a few weeks it feels like, and we stopped and had a good look and sure enough there was a faint yellow smudge of colour deep inside a bush. 

Try as I might to get a better angle, it remained noting more than a yellow smudge.. AND it kept moving around so I could never really get a good look at it. Then it flew out of the bush and across the roads off to some distant trees... but, in that moment, I caught a glimpse of it AND I actually, by sheer luck, happened to capture it in my little camera. 

Since then I've seen a few more. Once when I was riding again with Amanda a few days later. Also another time when I was on my own, but had the good camera with me... it's a little more cumbersome and doesn't just fit in my pocket... and can't be whipped out quite so quickly... but it DOES take MUCH BETTER pictures.... so... 

Chappel Marsh. Can you see the Yellow Warbler? It's in there somewhere... maybe...? 

Shooting across the road. Sometimes I just track a birds movement and click as many pictures as I can, hoping for the best. Most of the time it totally doesn't work... But this time IT DID!!!

A few days later... another yellow smudge deep within a tree... 

Oh, there it is again... 

I was originally going to paint it like this, because it seemed every time I saw one, I couldn't really see it... 

Hey! I got a picture of it's head! Yay! 

These two are the pictures Amanda managed to get with the good camera that same day... 

Not sure why I didn't get a picture of it in the same location with my little camera... maybe I'd given up and was trying to take a picture of something else entirely...?

A few days later I was out for a ride on my own and took the good camera and heard a Warbler and looked around and saw a dash of yellow way up in a tree beside the pathway. 

It was kind enough to stay still long enough for me to zoom in and get a few pictures... 

Fine... I'll just carry the good camera around now.. 

Seems it was a bit gusty up there in the tree. 

Seriously, half the pictures I take are of birds showing me their butts... Or are contorted into soem weird bird yoga mess of feather while it tried to preen itself... most just get edited out... Sometimes I think I could do a whole series of illustrations of birds in NON-SANDARD-BIRD-BOOK-ILLUSTRATION-POSES. Y'know, like they are MOST of the time I'm trying to look at them and spot the key identifying features... 

Oooh, getting a bit windy up their. 

hang on to your toupee! 

I honestly don't remember it being this windy that day..!? 

Talk about having a bad feather day! 

Also saw Barn Swallows and a Song Sparrow out at the Chappell Marsh that day. Hopefully finish those up tomorrow.