Backcountry Birding

This is a bit of a trial run for a new workflow, but with photos of a very familiar place. I’ve got a card reader that plugs into my phone, and so I’m sitting in the car after birding with my family at Altamaha WMA for an hour and a half, downloading photos and editing them on my phone! Imagine that!

We started out with the first Harrier any of us had seen in quite a while, a female (got farther-out looks at a male as we left). Lots of White and Glossy Ibis, Little Blue Herons and a few big and little yellowlegs were in the currently dry southern impoundment as we continued down the dike.

We also discovered that the Altamaha fire ants are doing VERY well for themselves; pretty much everywhere we stepped off the path to get a view over the cattails seemed to be another nest!

An immature (if I was a better birder I’d know which year) Bald Eagle flew just overhead clutching the world’s smallest fish in its talons.

This was my first time using my ‘new’ 5D III, the camera that was shattering the DSLR market when I first started saving up for a real camera … in 2012. It feels crazy to finally have my hands on one; the AF system is so much more advanced than the one on my 60D and it’s still so far behind the mirrorless options that have come out in the last few years.

As to why I didn’t buy a mirrorless: I have no mirrorless lenses and I don’t think I would like having an extra adapter to keep track of. I firmly believe lenses make more of a difference than a body ever could, so I took the middle-ground upgrade option. Who knows? I will almost definitely be switching to mirrorless as soon as I have a real income… in other words I’ll be using this camera for quite some time. I do like the AF:

Lots of Green-Winged Teal in the southwest impoundment and four Blue-Winged that we saw:

Four leftmost are Green-Winged (slightly smaller and with shorter bills) and right four are Blue-Winged (slightly more lanky and some showing the whitish crescent mark between the bill and the eye). I jlove the under-wing pattern on the bottom left GW, it really shows the little stripes on the covert feathers.

After about an hour we started walking back so as to not arrive in atlanta too late. We had bad traffic due to construction on the way up to Savannah but as I finish this post we are cruising west on I-16 without any trouble.

It was really great to go birding with the whole family again. Altamaha WMA was always a stop on the Georgia Youth Birding Competition route for my siblings and me, so it’s the site of many fond birding memories across the years. I have a feeling I’ll be birding alone quite a bit in 2023, so it’s nice to get to spend time with my folks in special places like Altamaha.