We have a water feature in our yard so we have lots of backyard birding adventures. This summer I bought a special mount to take digital pictures through my spotting scope. This process is referred to as “digiscoping.” Unfortunately, many of the pictures I first took turned out blurry. I’m having much better luck with my brand new mount.

Here’s a photo of one of our California scrub-jays taken with my Google Pixel phone. Isn’t it a beautiful bird?

I used my point-and-shoot Panasonic Lumix camera for this one. It was a little tricky to hold it in place on the mount. This a European starling and an American robin.

We get tons of robins at this time of the year and they chase other birds away.

This image is blurry but it captures a frequent visitor, a robin, next to an infrequent one, an evening grosbeak. Glad I got a quick glimpse of the grosbeak!

Here’s another infrequent visitor, a hermit thrush, and, you guessed it! – a robin. Five different thrushes are in our yard at this time of year.

Mountain chickadees are a common visitor.

Lesser goldfinches are also common. Here’s a group shot of these little lemon-colored birds next to a house finch. We also see American goldfinches occasionally.

Dark-eyed junco are frequent visitors. They aren’t afraid of the robins.

The pygmy nuthatches are a bit more shy.

The house finches, on the left, and northern flickers, on the right, are not shy at all.

Backyard birding in action

One day I took a lot of pictures through the spotting scope (with the old mount) that didn’t turn out great. Google turned them into a GIF and I like how it turned out. It gives you an idea of how fast these birds actually move. 😀

I’ll share more of my backyard birding adventures as I get better at taking pictures through the scope.

Bird Weekly Photo Challenge (BWPC) – In Your Yard or Garden

Sunday Stills (SS) – Kinda Backyard Birding