March 15th Report - San Angelo State Park

Another weekend happily stuck in San Angelo. Concho Valley Photography Club has their meetings on the 2nd Saturday of the month. Another organization that I'm a member of has their meetings on the 3rd Sunday of the month. This year March just happens to combine those into one happy stew. February did as well, but due to a scheduling issue they ended up on different weekends, but I digress.

So with a weekend that would be San Angelo bound, and with some work related things keeping me relatively close to home, it was definitely going to be San Angelo State Park for my weekend visit.

I went out relatively early Sunday morning and after doing some volunteer-related items I was able to get to shooting at about 8:30am.

The light was kind of tricky to work with. It started with significant overcast, but with enough light to work at 400 ISO. As the morning progressed it became more of a hide and go seek approach where the light was good, then too bright, then okay, and then very subdued all over a very short period of time.

My biggest issues Sunday morning was a lack of warm clothing and a lack of patience. Temps inside the blind were in the low 40's and I had not adequately planned for the outing, making it very uncomfortable. This lack of warm clothing likely added to my lack of patience as I spent less than an hour and a half in the blind. But even at that I made some nice images.

Species spread was good. No wrens in the blind and only 1 of the 2 woodpecker species (Golden-fronted) made a visit in. But cardinals were running pretty good and there were numerous Pyrrhuloxia visitors. We also had visits by both a male Northern Bobwhite and a Greater Roadrunner, though the Roadrunner was far more camera shy than the Bobwhite.

Hawks continue to make the rounds at the blind, causing massive fly-offs and periods of inactivity at the blind lasting 10-15 minutes.

No physical laundry list--I left my copy in the blind.

Images:
Brown-headed Cowbird, San Angelo State Park, ©2009 Jim Miller
Northern Bobwhite, San Angelo State Park, ©2009 Jim Miller