Blog

Sporadic dispatches from the hinterlands.

In search of the white hummingbird

We've been spending a lot of time at the UCSC Arboretum lately. We'd heard that a rare white hummingbird was sighted there, so we went to look for it.

We didn't see the white hummingbird on our first few visits, but we kept going back, a couple of times a day, until it eventually appeared. We think it's an Anna's Hummingbird, which is one of the most common species in our area. It is leucistic, which simply means that it has very little pigment in its feathers; unlike an albino, it does have normal pigment in the irises of its eyes. Leucism can be caused by mutations in any of several genes.

While we were there, we took a few shots of the more usual denizens of the arboretum.

Pigeon Point with Aaron

This morning the full moon set over the Pacific, just after sunrise. At least that's what I read on The Photographer's Ephemeris. Aaron and I went up to Pigeon Point hoping to catch dramatic light on a striking landscape, but we mostly saw a lot of clouds. The moon popped out for less than a minute, while we scrambled to get our cameras ready. Soon it was gone behind the clouds, and the rising sun was equally incognito. We wandered around the tidepools, snapped a few photos, and called it a morning. Maybe next time we'll find that dramatic light.

Spring Transect

A transect is a line across the landscape. Transects are often used in ecological studies, in order to see how things change as you go from one place to another. On our recent 2-week camping trip, we set out for the Mojave Desert but ended up doing a transect across California.

Carrizo Plain

Our first stop was Carrizo Plain, an almost-forgotten valley on the inland edge of the Coast Ranges. It's roughly on the way to the Mojave, it has some secluded campsites, and it's known for spring wildflowers.

At the visitor center, they told us that we had missed all the wildflowers, and the back roads were too slick to drive. We headed into the hills of the Caliente Range anyway, and we found some nice views, a few flowers, and some birds and lizards.

We ended up stopping at Carrizo on the way out and again on the way back to Santa Cruz; these photos are from both visits.

Mojave National Preserve

We wanted to see some lizards and desert flowers, so this was our main destination.

We spent a few days near the Granite Mountains, one of our favorite areas. Later, we visited Kelso Dunes, the Castle Peaks area, and the New York Mountains.

We planned to make birdwatching stops at Zzyzx and Afton Canyon, but the desert wore us down. We had good weather most of the time, but on our brief walk around Zzyzx, the temperature soared to 95 F, and the wind was soon blowing up to 40 mph. We decided it was time to look for a cooler climate.

Kern River

We drove through Barstow in a dust storm, buffeted by the wind. Our goal was to get into the southern part of the Sierra Nevada, where we could camp somewhere a little cooler than the Mojave. We soon found exactly that.

We took highway 178 toward the Kern River, and turned north on Canebrake Road, into the Chimney Peak area. We found some nice camping in the forest, with a great abundance of birds. We visited the Kern River Preserve, another outstanding spot for birds.

We wanted to go to a Forest Service road higher in the mountains, but it turned out to be closed due to snow, although there was no snow that we could see. That changed overnight. We camped near a small waterfall, Brian had his first (cold!) bath in some time, and we woke to a dusting of snow.

We ended up heading down toward Bakersfield via Rancheria Road, an old dirt road that passes through some nice foothill country. The driving was challenging, the truck drifting sideways at the slowest possible speeds in the mud and snow. Eventually we broke out of the storm and found a beautiful spot to camp. All too soon, we were on our way home, via Carrizo Plain (again) and then Big Sur.

Big Sur

We had a few days to spare, so we made a stop at Big Sur. We camped at our favorite spot in the hills, and spent some time enjoying the view. On our way home, we spent a little time walking around Point Lobos.

Overall, it was a good trip. We were out for about two weeks, sleeping in our rooftop tent the whole time, and never in a campground. We shot over 4,000 pictures, and struggled to winnow them down for this blog post. We saw over 100 species of birds, and camped in temperatures ranging from below freezing to much too hot. We were a little sad to come home.

New Lens

We just got a new lens: the Canon EF 100-400mm F4.5-5.6L IS II USM. We already have the Canon EF 400mm f/5.6L USM, but this new zoom lens has some advantages.

  • It's got image stabilization (IS), so we should be able to get sharp pictures at lower shutter speeds. With the old non-IS 400 mm, I try to keep the shutter speed above 1/1000 second. We'll see if the new IS lens does better.
  • It focuses much closer: about 3 feet, vs around 12 feet for the old one. This comes up fairly often, especially when shooting pictures of things such as lizards, butterflies, and the occasional friendly bird.
  • It's a zoom. Every once in a while, this could be handy, but I'll probably shoot it mostly at 400 mm.

The key question, though, is this: can I get sharp pictures with it? I went to the UCSC Arboretum and Farm (same place we went for the previous blog entry) to try it out.

I took some more pictures of the Oak Titmouse pair visiting their nest. They eat a lot of long-legged arthropods, but I can't tell if those are insects such as crane flies, or perhaps spiders. This titmouse has a sporty black band across his belly, but none of the other pictures of this species show the band. I guess it's just personal style.

The new lens performed similarly to the old one, but the new one did fail to focus properly on some shots. That's a concern, and I'll have to do some more testing.

The lens seemed to perform pretty well with lizards and birds. It's not clearly better optically than the old lens, but it does seem to do what it's supposed to do. I was able to get fairly close to the lizards (too close for the old lens to focus). Also I made some sharp pictures of a Dark-eyed Junco in deep shade with a shutter speed of 1/40 second -- unheard of for me with a 400 mm lens. Overall, it seems to perform well, though I could always wish for better. It will definitely be nice to have two 400 mm lenses, so Joy and I can both take bird pictures at the same time. So it looks like we're keeping it, although we're still within the return window.

-- Brian