Welcome to 2025 everybody!! Admittedly, I am now officially 0 for 2 in actually getting the date right, but don’t worry, the year is still young…there will be plenty more mistakes ha. The Intrigued holiday break is officially past and those not already assigned to the field are back in the office, stoking the fireplaces, cleaning up after the raucous year end party and based on the last weather report, shoveling the parking lot and salting the walkways. Fortunately, Linda and I are getting ready to enjoy the sun-soaked days of South Padre Island. Birding has been excellent so far including some very successful chases to pad the 2024 Average Year (not updated, link here) and getting the 2025 version off to a great start. Best of all, we have met some extremely kind and helpful birders on our trip down here! A big thank you and shoutout to Tim, Q, Tom, Tonya and Arthur – best of luck on your 2025 birding goals. While I dig out the sunscreen and finish up all the 2024 paperwork (hope I didn’t leave all those staff expense reports in the fireplace, wink), Brad is going to bring you a few finds from Sin City.
Take it away Brad…
As Brian has stated many times over the years, he has quite a backlog of photos to process and write stories about. I’m nowhere near his backlog levels. Even if I am, it’s only because of the grueling travel schedule Intrigued HQ has Jan and I on this year. Looking back through the queue of stories, I found this one that I had started, but had “misplaced” and not taken the time to finish. This story is from our trip to Las Vegas during September 2023.
In the afterglow of seeing a Desert Tortoise (see here) in Red Rock Canyon outside of Las Vegas, Jan and I decided to drive to the Willow Springs Picnic area to see the Petroglyph Wall.
We arrived at the park late in the day, after 4:30pm. Shadows were long in the canyon. We weren’t hopeful of seeing many desert birds. The shadows also helped reduce the desert temperature to a comfortable range while standing outside of the air-conditioned rental car. Early Fall can be quite warm in the desert. Forget about that “dry heat” nonsense, hot is hot. While we did see a few musings carved in the stone at the Petroglyph Wall, that wasn’t the really interesting part.
As Jan and I walked further up the trails and into the shadows in the canyon, we were cranking up the ISO as we went. Our cameras (replaced with the next model since writing this story, they did each have over 200K clicks on them) were most effective up to about ISO 3200, but past that it’s really an iffy proposition to get publishable photos. As it was, I thought I was stretching the cameras to the max with high ISO, aperture as wide as the lens would allow and a slower shutter speed than I would like to be using. Nikon’s Vibration Reduction (VR) helped a bit, but not nearly enough to keep the other settings low enough to catch spastic little birds in the scrub brush.
Sure enough, there were two little birds teasing us mercilessly. These LBJ’s lived there and probably knew our cameras were being taxed. Both of them were within feet of the ever-darkening trail. Each would flit to the outside of their respective bush/shrub, pause for about 1/250th of a second, and then bury themselves in the dark interiors again.
Hit the jump to read more about these very active finds.
Continue reading Two in the Bush…by Brad Marks
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