Johnny Stateside...

Well yer man is back from another trip to North America and ready to share!

No need to ask if time in the Californian sunshine has been restorative and relaxing because here I am sharing a little photo and I never share photos of myself...ever! Yes, it was a blast and quite productive as far as bug-hunting goes: in fact, so much so that I think there is way too much to put into one update and I can probably have two or three installments. 

Added to all the excitement of my invertebrate finds, were some quite surreal moments; like the time I was walking through Chinatown in San Francisco and stopped to listen to an Asian street musician playing what I think was an 'Erhu', only to realise that he was playing Auld Lang Syne.  Then there was the time I was hurtling through the American landscape on a train, listening to the Pizzicato Polka on my iPod (You gotta check out that tune BTW if you don't already know it). 

Even before I had departed UK soil, well tarmacadam, there was a moment when we seemed to have been taxiing for ages before take-off and eventually the pilot announced "Ladies and gentlemen, you may have noticed that we didn't take off (I did), unfortunately, when we refueled, the technician forgot to replace the filler cap. Now we have to return and add more fuel and get the cap replaced before we can depart". That took around an hour and I overheard somebody in the seat in front of me say "Wow! that's a bit like filling up with fuel at the garage and leaving your filler cap on the roof".

Anyhow, some 10 hours plus later, I was being patted down by a burly American official before heading off into the sunshine state.

And so what I will do is provide a little teaser of what is to come by just sharing some photographs of the amazing little hummingbirds that I saw. There will be additional updates that will feature the critters that I discovered, and I will do my utmost (scout's honour) to get those compiled and published just as soon as I can. I can confess upfront that bird photography is not my forte and I know better than anybody that I need practice to improve my technique; especially with these tiny, fast flying cuties. All that said, I hope you enjoy these photographs as much as I enjoyed taking them...

  

This one was bathing in a little stream

All of these needed lots of cropping, but this one I did less on to give an idea of proportion

This last picture was one where I experimented with my home made flash extender. It just consisted of a Fresnel lens mounted in front of small box that I mounted to the flash head. I think with more practice it could work well, but I did struggle with the correct amount of light. 

That's all for now, back in a...

Yes, there were plenty, plenty of these, and I seemed to become quite a magnet for them. Of all the things I could be a magnet for...it had to be a bloody tick!

Ooops...almost forgot to mention this: the blue tits that have been nesting in the garden now have seven eggs...