After months of procrastination, rationalization and excuses, I decided to bite the bullet and create my urban bird blog. Why now you may ask? Well I guess why not.
I’ve been taking pictures of birds on my lunch hour for the past several years. I have the misfortune, or so I thought, to work in an industrial area on the outskirts of Denver populated mostly by factories and warehouses. My regular half-hour walk, five minutes from my work, is a bike path nestled between two smoke spewing factories along the South Platte River. I did not start out photographing birds, for several years I walked this path with my head down avoiding cyclists and working toward my goal of 10,000 steps to weight loss. But that all changed on my first encounter with the Black-crowned Night heron pictured above (top-left image). On first sighting, I tried to identify this unusual bird, but when I got back to my office I couldn’t remember exactly what it looked like. My camera phone wasn’t any help, so I bought a camera with a 30x Zoom. The picture along with Cornell’s All About Birds website helped me identify this beautiful bird
I continued to take a camera with me as I got my exercise along the South Platte. Walking was more fun when there was something to see other than the occasional trash or tires strewn about. At first I only noticed the large birds Black Crowned Night Heron, Snowy Egret, and of course the Great Blue Heron. Actually what’s surprising is that I had been walking this path for several years and had not noticed these birds before some being from two to three feet high. I’m sure they were always there, but how I missed them I don’t know.
As I became more aware of my surroundings I would catch the flash of yellow from a small Yellow Warbler and then maybe the orange of a Bullock’s Oriole. My one or two bird sightings turned into dozens. Soon I had pictures of over 60 different bird species, all taken between two factories on a 30 minute lunch hour.
I showed a few of my pictures to my friends and they urged me to share my pictures on a blog. So here I am sharing my photos with the world, or more accurately, the occasional stray googler who haphazardly finds my site through their internet wanderings.