2012 November 18, from Santa Cruz CA

Hello, Everybody,

These last few months have been busy: several trips from
Portland to the Oregon Coast, twice between Portland OR and
Santa Cruz CA, and a visit to Boston via the airlines. EV
and I have spent a half-dozen days birding around Portland,
and a weekend at the coast. I've been finding a few 'new'
birds for my North American life list, and experimenting
with different camera gear. After trying a couple of
'monster' Nikon lenses on a new Nikon body, I decided that
although the weight was manageable, it was not fun, so I
reverted to my smaller Canon tele lens but with an upgraded
Canon body -- which does seem to be capturing more better
images more often.

Summer birding is fairly slow, but the Autumn migration,
although more diffuse and spread out than the Spring, perked
things up considerably. I'd hoped to find a Rhinoceros
Auklet along the coast, and in the huge sea cave near
Florence OR, one of the volunteer guides there was able to
point one out to me. My target bird for my trip to Boston
was the American Black Duck which EV had seen there earlier
(unknown in the western US), and when Amy and Lewis and I
walked up to a little pond recommended by a birder we'd met
earlier, there was one swimming right in front of us.

Autumn colors have provided a few unexpected bonus bird
images, with surreal reflections from the water -- they
almost look like some of the 'creative' images people are
doing in Photoshop, but I would have no idea how to go about
generating these artificially.

As I was driving from Portland to Santa Cruz recently, two
weeks and $14,000 disappeared when my truck diesel engine
broke and needed replacing -- 250,000 miles is quite early
for this engine to need replacement, but perhaps it was
built on a Friday. I was fortunate to find a small-town Ford
dealer which was very cooperative and made the whole
experience a lot better than it could have been --being able
to wander in the shop and kibitz is more interesting than
sitting in a motel room.

The server address is:     http://www.meetmarsha.com/~john
(note the tilde ~ before the john part)

The new slideshow is 12_08_11_Aug_Nov_OR_CA
at the top of the list.

Boilerplate follows: Each browser is a little different, but
generally you can either choose OPEN to view the show once,
or choose SAVE TO DISK and then OPEN if you want to have it
your hard drive for future re-viewing.

Right-Arrow or Right-Click or SpaceBar will advance to the
next picture. Left-Arrow or Left-Click will return to the
previous picture. Esc will end the show at any time; use Esc
if the show ever seems stuck.

If you would like any of the individual images, perhaps to
print, just let me know. I periodically remove older
slideshows to put up new ones; let me know if you want me to
send you a CD of any of the 'back issues', or of all of them
from 2004-2012 along with their accompanying emails, on CDs.
And if you don't want to get any more emails like this one
in the future, just let me know. If you have friends who
might be interested, I'll be happy to add them to my email
list and they can download the slideshows if they have a
Windows computer and broadband internet connection. None of
this is commercial or copyrighted, the more who enjoy the
pictures, the better.

Regards, John Armitage 1-970-250-6080 john@qued.com