{"id":3865,"date":"2022-01-08T09:00:12","date_gmt":"2022-01-08T16:00:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/?p=3865"},"modified":"2022-01-09T23:01:39","modified_gmt":"2022-01-10T06:01:39","slug":"a-year-in-pictures-2021","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kairosphotos.com\/blog\/a-year-in-pictures-2021\/","title":{"rendered":"A Year in Pictures – 2021"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

When I got my first coronavirus vaccine shot almost a year ago, I had high hopes that 2021 would prove different than its predecessor. I started to make plans for trips abroad. And then came shot number two, and I felt ready to take on the world. Sadly, the world wasn\u2019t as fortunate as me. Places I needed to go, like the Philippines and Indonesia, tightened restrictions on foreigners as Covid ran amuck. That meant more months of staying home. Which meant more months of capturing images of my big Pacific Northwest backyard. Like a Western trillium (Trillium ovatum<\/em>) in the deep woods. Or the ubiquitous rhododendron photographed before dawn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Where you have flowers, you have bugs, like this Western tiger swallowtail (Papilio rutulus<\/em>) slurping nectar from a native Mock orange (Philadelphus lewisii<\/em>) in my garden, its legs covered with pollen. Since their lifespan as a butterfly is only two weeks or less, there\u2019s no time to waste, so they\u2019re great bugs to watch. Despite significant habitat depletion, Swallowtails remain pretty common in western North America. Unlike the endangered Monarch, which has evolved to depend on milkweed, the Swallowtails aren’t as picky about food sources and where they lay their eggs. So they fare much better. Their larvae are a favorite food of birds, but particularly in caterpillar form they’ve developed a pretty cool chemical defense, converting aristolochic acids found in their host plants into a spray that when frightened they squirt out of a forked organ called an osmeterium. That was my Scrabble word for 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And where you have bugs, you\u2019ll have birds, whether it\u2019s a Red-winged blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus<\/em>) catching a morsel in midair or a tiny Bushtit (Psaltriparus minimus<\/em>) eyeing tasty honeysuckle aphids (Hyadaphis passerinii<\/em>) while hanging upside down on native honeysuckle (Lonicera ciliosa<\/em>). Or a Spotted towhee (Pipilo maculatus<\/em>) chowing down on a yellowjacket (Vespula spp<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Most days I didn\u2019t have to go far to find birds to photograph. On a branch outside my bedroom window I watched Cedar waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum<\/em>) engage in courting behavior by passing food back and forth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Sometimes it would get complicated. One day in May, a whole museum of waxwings showed up, with several pairs of birds sharing berries. And then there were these three birds. The one in the middle kept sharing its fruit first with one, then with the other, hopping back and forth along the osoberry branch. Cue the Luvin’ Spoonful<\/em> singing “Did You Ever Have to Make Up Your Mind?”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The pond in our backyard is a magnet for many types of birds, including this Green heron (Butorides virescens<\/em>). It\u2019s one of the world\u2019s few tool-using bird species, often creating fishing lures with insects and feathers, dropping them on the water to entice small fish to the surface where it grabs them. And we had Hooded mergansers (Lophodytes cucullatus<\/em>) show up early in the year, including this male who put on an impressive mating ritual where it throws its head back and makes sexy noises.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Having ducks on the pond also meant having hungry big birds around. Hawks and owls and other raptors were frequent visitors. We saw that when some baby mallards appeared in the spring time. At first there were eleven. Then hawks would show up, sending the ducks and crows into a tizzy. (When I hear the crows frantically cawing, I run outside to look for hawks.) Then there were nine ducklings. Then five. Then three. Then one. Finally, they were all gone. Nature can be cruel, especially when we arbitrarily assign \u201ccuteness\u201d to some species but not to others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A similar dynamic took place when we discovered a Bushtit nest in our backyard. The little birds (each weighs about the same as three paperclips) built it as a community, as unattached males voluntarily chip in their labor. I started shooting video of them flying in and out of the hanging nest with bits of feather and moss, wiggling around inside as they got it ready. I wanted to document their life all the way to the babies emerging. We were worried about squirrels getting to it, so sprayed a hot pepper mixture on the branches nearby, which prevented squirrels from getting to the nest. But one day, we think just before the babies hatched, we found the nest with a big hole in its side, the Bushtits gone. It was probably a hungry crow or hawk. Fortunately, we still have Bushtits in our little patch of creation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Even smaller than the Bushtit are hummingbirds, and we\u2019re blessed to have their almost constant accompaniment. Here’s a female Anna’s hummingbird (Calypte anna<\/em>) enjoying the Red flowering currant (Ribes sanguineum<\/em>) in our garden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Beyond our garden and pond, we are fortunate to live in a region blessed by wonderful birds, from the tiny yet raucous Marsh wren (Cistothorus palustris<\/em>), the fascinating amphibious Water ouzel (Cinclus mexicanus<\/em>), to hungry giant Ospreys (Pandion haliaetus<\/em>), a Northern harrier (Circus hudsonius<\/em>) carrying its dinner, and magnificent Bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus<\/em>), to a googly-eyed male American bittern (Botaurus lentiginosus<\/em>) with its unforgettable thumping mating call.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This past year I acquired a drone. I took the examination and was certified as a drone pilot by the FAA, but was reluctant to advertise what I had done. The problem is: I don’t like drones. More exactly, I don’t like a lot of drone pilots, who think they can buzz around and bother everyone else just cause they can. Seriously, anti-drone restrictions by governments are becoming a problem, but they’re brought on by stupid, entitled behavior by some drone pilots. So not wanting to acquire guilt by association, when I began to post drone images on Facebook during the year, I claimed that I had attached some balloons to a folding lawn chair and sailed into the sky with my camera. I thought it was a clever, if albeit an obvious ruse, but there were a few who proved fairly gullible, asking me how big the balloons were and what gas I used in them. I became pretty good at sounding like I really knew how to pilot a lawn chair.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As I experimented and learned how to operate it, I was intrigued by how things look different from above, how patterns and shapes appeared from a different perspective. Circles, for example, could be found many places, including in the cooling tower of an abandoned nuclear reactor, an old railroad turntable, the waste lagoon of a paper mill, and a sewage treatment plant. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Patterns pleased me as I sailed high above in my lawn chair, including those of shadows in a hazelnut orchard and tracks in a farmer’s field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Coastal lighthouses look slightly different when you elevate your perspective a bit. As does the Maersk Singapore when seen in Puget Sound from above. And an auto wrecking yard was a delight to gaze at from on high. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The drone is a new tool in my camera bag, and I look forward to using it in work situations. Unfortunately, on the one trip I took abroad this year, to South Sudan, I had to submit an equipment list to the government there ahead of time. I included the drone, which produced a warning from their state security officials that I was not allowed to bring it into the country. That’s a common prohibition these days, especially in countries at war. Too bad, because it would be invaluable in covering places like refugee camps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mostly I have used the drone just for still photos, but did experiment a bit with video, again looking for some unique perspective. Here’s an example: the courtship rituals of harbor seals on the Oregon coast. For the record, lest I be confused with bothersome drone idiots, I should note that the federal government is currently developing guidelines for observing marine mammals from the air, but existing law makes it a federal crime to harass these and other marine creatures. I was over 150 feet above the water. I used a zoom to capture the action in 4K, then cropped the video in post to make the animals seem closer. I don’t believe they were aware of my presence, quietly hanging there in my lawn chair under the balloons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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