I picked up my camera for the first time in months today! Not just to dust it off and clean up around it, either. I actually spent most of the day outside wandering around taking a stupid amount of photos. That doesn’t necessarily mean any of them will be GOOD photos… but it was important to de-rust.

Anyway, as I’m going through all the photos taken today, I would like to say that approximately 98% of bird photos turn out... like this. I think this goes for any wildlife photography, really. You will take literally hundreds of thousands of shots over the lifetime of a single camera body, and most of them will be... bird asses.

You will also run into issues taking photos of certain subjects you’re looking for. For instance, I can almost never get a photo of Brutus, the Carolina Wren I raised, because whenever I have my camera outside he’s always doing something down in a brush pile, or somehow sneaks behind me to get into whatever trouble he happens to be interested in at the time. Today I witnessed him hop past piles upon piles of food on the back porch, to instead go behind where I was shooting, and hop into the bag of peanuts because he is a spoiled brat and wants them directly from the bag.

There’s also one of our oldest regulars to the backyard, a White-breasted Nuthatch, who I heard all morning but didn’t see once, because ????? free food is overrated? Who knows!

Then there’s the birds who land on me while I’m trying to photograph them, or they land anywhere from a couple inches to a foot away from me where the current lens I’m using cannot physically focus because they’re too close.

But man, when the stars align after you’ve been sitting in the cold, in the snow, in the blistering wind for hours at a time, birds are in your field of view, are at the right focal length, and everything is pretty okay... they decide to turn around and you just get a lens full of bird ass.