Photographer in Colorado

Returning home, I made my way back via the Ohio Creek road and headed up Ohio Pass. On the cliff face, the afternoon sun caught these aspen trees on the edges of the scree slope.

In the following image, I chose a composition where the line of aspen trees climbed up one side of the cliff face, over the top, and then continued down the other side. Almost like an inverted V-shape.

I spent time making some images of ferns that grow at the base of most of the aspen forests. I have never been very successful with capturing these ferns. Add to self: maybe next time?

During the course of the afternoon, the storm clouds over Castle Mountain grew in intensity. The color image does not do justice to this big storm, so I converted to a monochrome black and white image. This shows the contrast of the mountain cliffs, dark skies and low clouds.

After reaching the top of Ohio Pass, it is a short distance to Kebler Pass. I made my way down to the base of the pass, near Horse Ranch Park, to make this image. I like the way that the mountain meadow forms an S-curve as it winds up through the forest.

When the aspen leaves change colors in the fall, the edges of the green leaves are lined with yellow. Over time, this yellow lining then spreads inwards until the green is replaced. I managed to find one tree close to the roadside that showed this progression of color change, below.

The aspen tree trunks have some interesting bark patterns. The following pattern looks like a helmet. Did Darth Vader visit the aspen forests?

Finally, along came a spider!

After making these images, I headed home through Crested Butte, Cottonwood Pass and Buena Vista.

Continuing up Ohio Pass, I made the following image of backlit aspen trees with low clouds that were hanging in the valley below.

Ohio Creek receives some of its water from a waterfall that cascades down some steep cliffs.

There as several rock scree slopes that border the aspen forests. These slopes are created by alternate thawing and freezing of steep rock faces.

Castle Mountain is located in the West Elk Wilderness that borders close to Ohio Pass. During the course of the day that I spent on the pass, Castle Mountain was obscured several times by storm clouds. Occasionally the storms cleared, allowing me to capture an image of the mountain and surrounding forests.

Later in the day, I made another stop in Gunnison and headed back towards Ohio Creek. Along the way, I stopped at Carbon Creek, a location that I discovered one summer, maybe 3 years ago. There are several beaver ponds in this creek that slow the flow of water downstream. During the fall, this allows one to capture reflections of the fall colors in the water.

I made my way back up Ohio Pass, stopping at the base of the pass to capture the following green, yellow, orange and red colors of the quaking aspen trees.

Of course, I could not ignore capturing those red aspen leaves, in the following image.

After leaving Gunnison, I stopped to make another image of the storm clouds over Gunnison Basin.

In the above image, I converted the image to monochrome black and white. This allowed me to emphasize the bright triangular cloud over the mountain.

Last week was a great time to experience the fall colors in Colorado. I made a trip to Gunnison to view the fall colors in the Crested Butte and Gunnison area. The weather that day was a mixture of overcast clouds, sun and rain. Colors of the leaves varied between green, yellow, orange and red. The Gunnison Basin has plenty of Cottonwood trees that are as spectacular as the Aspen trees that are found at higher elevations. It was still very early to experience the colors of the Cottonwoods. I arrived in Gunnison during mid-afternoon and made the following image.

After setting up the tent in the campsite, I made my way on the road that followed the course of Ohio Creek. At one spot, I spotted these Aspen trees with the full range of fall colors.

Close to where I had parked, were these red aspen leaves that contrasted with the green leaves in the background.

That night it rained. The following morning the Gunnison basin had spectacular low clouds. As I headed back towards Ohio Creek, I made this image as the sun was rising.

Many of the farms in the basin grow cattle feed. I made this image of one of the fields lit by the low sun.

There was a fire burning close by, maybe from a BBQ smoker. Smoke rising from this fire was backlit by the rising sun.

Later, when I got to Ohio Pass, there were low clouds over the Aspen forests. I waited for a gap in the clouds that lit up the trees in the following image.

Here are some of the low clouds passing up the slopes.

I spent many hours the same day making images along the pass. More to come.

A couple of weekends ago, I headed out to Westerly Park, to see what birds I could find after a break from that location of some 4 months. Soon after arriving, I found several Western Kingbirds. Many of these were immature or juvenile birds that had been busy hunting bugs. There were about 2 or 3 birds perched in one of the trees close to the trail.

Kingbirds are flycatchers, so they perch on branches until bugs and insects fly past. Periodically they take flight to catch some insects, so I decided to wait and see.

This bird made several flights to catch insects. Maybe I would be lucky to capture some of the in-flight action?

After several attempts, I managed to capture a flight sequence. First, as the bird took flight, below.

Once in flight, flycatchers have very erratic flight patterns as they attempt to capture insects.

It proved to be difficult to capture a flight sequence, because flycatchers have extremely erratic flight patterns. However, I did manage to get a few shots.

Altogether, there must have been at least a dozen Kingbirds along the creek. After a few more attempts with these 2 or 3 Kingbirds, I decided to make my way to another part of Westerly Creek. Here I found a few Snowy Egrets that were wading along the shore. I had been watching this Egret, when it turned and started to walk in my direction. It had spotted a Crawdad at the edge of the reeds.

And then caught the creature.

I captured several images as the Egret was meandering around the shore with its catch.

After manipulating the Crawdad in its bill, the Egret walked along the shore to my right.

Maybe I could capture the Egret swallowing the Crawdad?

No luck. There were more bushes and reeds at the side that obscured the Egret from me. No worries, I had a great afternoon seeing some different kind of bird behavior at Westerly Creek.

This year we were fortunate to observe several “small” birds with parents. So I decided to include some of the images that were captured.

We were walking along a trail adjacent to the South Platte River at Chatfield State Park. In the distance, I noticed a Female Common Merganser swimming downstream, accompanied by a little bird. The Merganser swam downstream and was hidden for a short while. By the time she got close to me, the baby Merganser had got onto her back. The river was quite busy, with several paddle boarders working their way upstream. Maybe that was the reason that the baby had hitched a ride?

A few days later, we visited the same location. This time, we found another Female Common Merganser with two babies on the far bank of the South Platte River. All three were swimming upstream, pausing to feed along the way. In this image, the two babies had their heads underwater while their mother was watching out.

Earlier in the year, before nesting season, I noticed several Wood Ducks in the same location. They had obviously paired up for breeding since then. On this day, one of the female ducks was swimming along the far bank with young birds in tow. There were at least four young Wood Ducks; there may have been more young Mergansers, since they often left the water and were weaving through the undergrowth on the far bank, returning to the water periodically.

The female Wood Duck made way downstream and crossed to our side of the river. I captured this image of her swimming with two of the young in tow.

That was a good day, to see both Mergansers and Wood Ducks, both with young.

More recently, we headed down to Chatfield, searching for a woodpecker without success. Returning back past one of the lakes. Here there were plenty of Cormorants and some Mergansers. There was actually one female Common Mergansers with three of her young offspring.

I was watching this family group, when they all took off, running at speed on the water with their flippers. They were rushing to a feeding frenzy where they joined a couple of Cormorants.

I noticed this group had been following the Cormorants around the lake. Perhaps the Cormorants were stirring up the fish? Every time the Cormorants surfaced around the lake, the Mergansers were not too far away. I was lucky to see the running on the water and feeding frenzy! In the image below, the young Merganser at the right had caught a small fish. It looks like the Cormorant on the left was swallowing some fish too.

Later, as we headed back along the trail, I noticed a fledgling house wren that had just landed on branch. This little bird was learning to fly.

I managed to capture this fledgling as it was exercising it’s wings. Those wings are just too small!

I had seen this fledgling had leaving the branch outside the cavity nest below. We hung around this nest to see what else was happening. It turned out that the two parent House Wrens were taking turns feeding their babies in the cavity nest. Here one parent was delivering some tasty fast food for the young!

We could see a couple of babies in the cavity with their mouths wide open. Perhaps the fledgling that I noticed was also from the same brood, but had left earlier?

This year we found that Chatfield offered some eventful trips!

During our visits to the Chatfield State Park, we encountered many Hummingbirds. If one is familiar with hummingbirds, the first thing that is noticed is the high pitched wing beats when they are in flight at speed. Broad-Tailed Hummingbirds are some of the more common varieties that we see. When approaching close to a nest, these birds occasionally hover close by.

During early June, I found this female hummingbird perched on a branch. Periodically, she would take flight and hover around as I moved.

This gave me a clue that I should vacate the area so that her nest was not disturbed. I made another image as she returned to a different perch.

We made several trips to Chatfield during the month of June, where I managed to capture a male bird that was perched on a branch in the middle of feeding.

This year, we heard reports of a Red-Headed Woodpecker in Chatfield. Last weekend, we headed down to the State Park, hoping to find this infrequent visitor to this area. While there, I noticed a Broad-Tailed Hummingbird, hovering and feeding under the cover of some trees. As we moved away this bird disappeared from sight. I decided to retrace our path, and this bird re-appeared. There was a nest close by, so I moved away and soon this female bird settled into her nest. I made a couple of images of her on her nest as we left the area. Her nest was a lot taller, and more elongated, than many of the hummingbird nests we often see.

Returning back by a different route, I noticed a male Broad-Tailed Hummingbird hovering near a thistle bush.

Here I made several images the male fed from the thistle flower, in between perching on close by branches.

These hummingbirds are tiny, some 2-1/2 to 3 inches in length, and hover with several hundred wing beats per minute. Also, their wings are so thin that they are translucent, as can be seen in the image below.

Returning to the vehicle, we passed by another (empty) hummingbird nest. These nests are typically the size of a (breakfast) egg cup. The specimen below is the typical shape of one of these nests.

During our return trip to the vehicle, we did eventually see the Red-Headed Woodpecker perched in a dead tree. It soon fled as a couple of Ospreys flew by with fish that they had caught.

This year we heard of reports of an American Redstart near the Audubon Center at Chatfield. During a late afternoon in early June, we headed down to the Audubon Center to see for ourselves; we did find a nesting pair. Later when returning back to our vehicle, we stopped off near the Center. Here we found a Tree Swallow perched on the roof of a bird feeder.

After a while, we noticed a second Swallow flying close by, so I decided to approach closer to capture this image of the female bird on the feeder roof.

Soon it became apparent that this was a breeding pair; the male bird flew in.

And began mating with the the female.

This continued several times over the next 15 minutes that we were there. Here is another image of the male flying in.

I made several images of the mating pair before we returned home.

We were both fortunate to see this mating display as well as the nesting Redstart!