Good catch, Courtney.

There is a very small pond in a corner of our neighborhood park. It comes complete with a 'warming house' for ice skaters. In summer the pond is a scummy haven for insects, attracting barn swallows that nest in the rafters...

Barn Swallows - where.jpg (135.05 KiB) Viewed 599 times

You can look for bird poop to see where the nests are

See the little guy just about filling up the nest? The parents are friendly and make no attempt to dive bomb people; they just perch and watch. 'course, if I were to get real close to the nest, that may be a different story.

Barn Swallows.jpg (187.4 KiB) Viewed 599 times

Rusty

Cool pictures, dad. Are you sure that is only one chick in the nest? Hard to tell.

Courtney

Great picture, Courtney. I hope you can get another picture as they get a little bigger -- before they leave the nest.

No, Courtney, I am not sure at all.
But ... if there are more than one, they are coordinating to see that only one beak pokes out at a time. The amount of feathers showing (I can see it better in original high res) suggest more than one chick.

I had to drag over a picnic table to stand on to get that shot. Mom & Dad were still pretty cool with what I was doing but I was keeping my distance from the nest.

Rusty

This is far from a nest, but I didn't know where else to put it. We went to a humming bitd sanctuary today. It is actually a feeding station for the little guys before they continue on their journey. I took about 200 photos and was able to save about 20 of them. The birds were in very deep tree shade and moving in their true form. They are lightening fast. This photo has been lightened and sharpened a tiny bit and has no other post processing. What do you thimk?

What do you think?

I think it'd great!!

I would be thrilled with 10% keepers fur such a difficult subject.

Rusty

Hi Weez,

I think it's an awesome shot. Those are challenging conditions to shoot in. However, you're uploading such a small file that it looks quite pixelated, so it's hard to really tell how nice it is.

Courtney

What is the largest size we can upload? I'll try that for all to see. He really is a gorgeous little bird.

If you are going to upload as an image put into a post (as you did), it is 500px on the longest side. If you are going to put something into your gallery (you should set one up, Weez), around 800-to-850 on the longest side works pretty well.

Rusty