Friday, April 27, 2018

Seasonal Explosion of Orange and Yellow: Western Tanager on the Tuolumne River

I'm posting a fuzzy poorly composed picture of a Western Tanager (Piranga ludoviciana) for "Murphy's Law" reasons: if I put up a bad picture, it increases the chance of getting a good picture the next day because I don't tend to put up back-to-back posts of the same species. And I want a better picture! The Western Tanager is a very pretty bird, and I only rarely see them along my stretch of the Tuolumne River. This sighting a few days ago was the first of the season (it was one of the other orange and yellow explosions of that morning). I certainly hope to see a few more.

That's not to say that I haven't taken a nice picture of a Tanager. It was the picture below (along with a few others) that I took in 2014 up at Clark Fork in the Sierra Nevada that may have given me the impetus to jump into birding in a more serious way. Seeing such a brightly colored bird in an environment that I had always assumed was populated by drab species really captured my imagination and I started looking at bird species in a new light.

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