Photo101 Rehab (Week 33)…Going for the gold

The meadows of my park walk are the warm weather home to goldfinches, beautiful birds characterized by their mini-roller coaster flight patterns.  There are certain areas where I can be generally certain of spotting them.  I’ll glimpse the undulating flight of a small dot of gold and there one is. Often more than several fly together above the grasses and flowers, looking for seeds or perhaps just enjoying the flight.  However, the amount of sightings is inversely proportional to the ease of capturing one of the little beauties on camera!

The first problem is that the iPhone, wonderful though it is, will never work for these shots. A phone of any type won’t zoom in nearly enough, nor can a distant photo of one be successfully enlarged.  Secondly, goldfinches are either quite shy or very wary or both.  They don’t sit long and once I stop, they’re usually on the wing almost immediately.  Of course, in the nature of these things, the two times my husband and I have gone biking around the little lake near our house and I haven’t taken my phone, the cheeky blighters have mocked me by getting quite close!

Female goldfinch

By taking my Nikon out periodically on walks, I’ve managed to snap a few decent shots of these stunning birds.  But for every shot that turned out, I’ve consigned twice as many to the trash bin.  As with many birds, the male has the brighter color, vivid yellow in summer, while the female sports a dull yellow brown during the same time.   Both may be aggressive through the short breeding season, but are gregarious the rest of the time. Goldfinches use their feet to cling to plants while their specially designed beaks remove seeds.  They also enjoy eating at feeders.  Meadows and grasslands are their homes, so deforestation actually helps them.  They’re found year-round in much of the United States.

Here’s what a goldfinch in flight looked like when I tried to follow it with my camera.