Hello friends,                               2005/05/05

I'm back at my brother's in Colorado after a wonderful winter: lots of
great scenery, friends, and bird photography. I sent the last email
and slideshow upload from my old IBM friend Joey Tuttle's home
near Santa Cruz, and his daughter and son-on-law were able to
identify three of my 'mystery flowers' from the mountains south of
Carmel Valley, so these start the new slideshow 05NW1.

With some encouragement from Joey, I decided to get some
photographic gear to be able to get a higher success rate in bird
photography and to be able to photograph birds in flight,
something I could not really do using my spotting scope and little
Canon 'point-and-shoot' camera (which does do very well,
however, on scenery and closeup photos). Study on the Web and a
visit to the huge camera store in Palo Alto pointed me to what most
serious nature and sports photographers use, the Canon Image
Stabilized 600mm or 500mm lens on a digital SingleLensReflex; these
are the big white lenses you see at sports events. All the bird forums
recommended the 500mm because even though it is a heavy
monster, the 600mm is even worse. To avoid $800 in California sales
tax I ordered from New York City, and a couple of days later had a
real supertoy to play with. I hadn't appreciated how beneficial
other features of the camera would be in addition to the high
magnification of the long focal length lens: the EOS 20D camera will
fire at 5 shots per second and track in autofocus on moving targets,
and having 8 Mpx means I can get further magnification (digital
zoom) by cropping in PhotoShop, as long as I am only presenting the
pictures on a computer screen and not wanting to print them large.
The Wimberly head works extemely well, putting the center of mass
right on the tilt axis so the camera and lens just sit where they are left
without any tendency to tilt over   this helps a lot in tracking flying
birds. I'm still learning to use all this great new stuff, and am
extremely pleased with the results so far. The very first 3 pictures I
tried came out great   a Great Egret, Canada Geese in flight, and
White-fronted Geese landing on the water. 

After leaving Joey's I drove through the beautiful Redwoods of
Northern California, then on back-roads in the Trinity Alps where I
managed to get stuck in the snow trying to barge through an
uncleared road at high elevation   the snow was only a bit more
than a foot deep, but was very solid and compacted, perfect
snowball snow and also perfect tire and underbody stopping. I
winched through and could then plow back downhill to try a more
sensible route. 

I've long wanted to visit the birding places in the Klamath basin, on
the California/Oregon border, but when I arrived at the National
Wildlife Reserves there it was blowing so hard I could barely stand
up. Nonetheless I managed to get the first 3 bird shots mentioned
above, then in view of a forecast for continuing winds decided to
move further north into Oregon to the Malheur NWR. A ranger at
Klamath told me exactly where to go near Malheur to see the
courting display of Sage Grouse on a 'lek', an area (seemingly no
different than any other area) where the grouse have been coming
probably for thousands of years so the males can show off their
fanned tailfeathers and inflatable neck sacks. I camped there for
the sunrise display, and was rewarded with perhaps 20 grouse
displaying within 75 yards. There were a half dozen other birders who
drove up in cars before it started getting light, but the vehicles did
not seem to bother the birds. For those especially interested in
birding and/or photography, I've made a separate slideshow with a
bunch of the grouse pictures: 05GROUSE.exe

Next was to head north and then west to Portland to camp outside
the home of my sailing friends from Norway days, Mike & Susan
Huffman, and visit daughter EV and son Ben and his wife Morgan.
Mike and Susan had adopted an ex-racer Greyhound 'Jasper' who
is a delightful dog, and we had some fun trying out the big lens
setup on Jasper accelerating and chasing after a tennis ball. EV and
I camped overnight in the coastal mountains and had fun hiking
above the Pacific coast.

On the way back to Colorado I had a quick visit with my friend
Warren Guffin in Missoula, just before he took off for a week of
backpacking in SE Utah. Then down through Idaho, camping in the
same spot I'd camped with my Dad nearly 4 years ago in a
beautiful desert valley with mountains in all directions. In the
photograph I took there you can just see the camper as a little dot
sitting on a finger ridge above the valley.

Just before stopping at my friend Mark Silver's in Salt Lake City, I
spent an afternoon at Bear River NWR. I'd had a disappointing visit
there a year ago, with very few birds and huge dense clouds of
biting brine flies. This time there were plenty of birds and the clouds
of mosquito-like insects were not biters, so I had a chance learn
more how to use the new photo gear. I couldn't track perfectly on
the flying birds, and got a couple of what would have been the very
best shots clipped on the edge of the frame, but even so I was
happy with the results. Again, I've made a separate slideshow with
many bird pictures 05BigBear.exe to supplement the few in the main
slideshow.

Mark's son Sam was playing in a soccer game, so I played sports
photographer and got around 100 good pictures which Mark plans
to distribute to the kids playing. To get full-body shots I had to back
off 2/3 of the length of the field, which has the advantage that the
distance is not changing so much as the kids run around on the field.

Mark is the originator of the AllTopo digital mapping system, and
finally convinced me to put all my US and Canadian CDs of
scanned topographic maps (probably 30,000 maps) onto an
external hard drive, and this works really well! Not only do I no longer
have to shove CDs in and out of the laptop, they load faster, and
best of all I don't have to carry a huge crate of boxed CDs with me.
I bought two identical 80Gig drives, one for backup, and have them
each filled with 78.5Gig of maps. My old ThinkPad 600 I use for
navigation, and its backup 600, both died suddenly, so I've got a
slightly newer ThinkPad coming from eBay for $200 as replacement,
and on this I can run Windows 2000 which will be more stable than
the Windows 98 I've been living with.

Today is a big '5' day for Ben: he is 25 on 2005/05/05.

In a few weeks I'll be heading for the next 6 months in BC, the Yukon,
the Northwest Territory, and Alaska. I'll be a bit earlier than last year
and am hoping that I don't get eaten up by the mosquitoes too
badly, and that the smokey fires are not so bad as last year. Amy is
flying into Fairbanks for 10 days in late August and EV for 10 days in
early September, and I'm looking forward to exploring a bit of
Alaska with them.

Here are the same old instructions for the slideshows:

http://www.firestardesign.com/johna. 

(Note that this is still 'johna' in spite of my recent email address
change to be just 'john')

Click on 05NW1.exe, and if using Internet Explorer you can either
choose OPEN to view the show once, of choose SAVE TO DISK if you
want to have it your hard disk for future re-viewing. The other two
bird slideshows are 05GROUSE.exe and 05BearRiver.exe. I have used
my updated PC-cillin to be sure the files are virus free. 

Right-Click or Spacebar will advance to the next picture
Left-Click will return to the previous picture
Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc when you reach the last
image ('Black-necked Stilt') if the show seems stuck

If you don't have a broadband Internet connection it's not realistic
to download these large files   please let me know, as it is very easy
for me to send them to you on a CD. And if you would like any of the
individual images, just let me know.

Regards, John Armitage