Photographing birds in grass is hard!! Granted, I could feed my crow friends in the grass, and a few of them are comfortable enough to forage around me, but I didn't want to use them for the #smap contest. It felt like cheating, and it wasn't very challenging. I wanted the contest to feel like a contest. I wanted to try, dang it.
Efforts to get any shots of grass-foraging starlings early in the week failed miserably, and I was about to resort to an old and slightly boring shot of a robin I had taken on an island in Washington, but this morning I ventured out for one more try. And I saw these tiny little common house finches.
I'm guessing they were a mated pair, since they kept in close proximity of one another and there were no other finches on the ground with them. These tiny, skittish little birds were SUPER HARD TO GET IN FOCUS. I got so many gorgeous images of crisp green grass with impressionistic paintings of finches behind them. But a few made the cut.
Here's the cute couple foraging together.
The male hopped out of view behind a garbage can (which I have graciously cropped out of the photo for you), so I kept track of the female. I had no idea until that moment how much a female finch could blend into a green lawn. The only way I was able to focus was when I could see the darker markings on her wings. The rest of the time I was just guessing.
Luckily, what she did next was so cute that I had to overlook her being slightly out of focus. I present to you, the dandelion-eating mini-velociraptor, and my Official Photo Entry for #smap:
I'd never stopped to watch a finch pull the seeds out of a dandelion, and I may never have were it not for this photo challenge. It was so fascinating!
After watching the female for a bit, the male popped back into view. He was closer to me than she was, and his being red made it a little easier to get him into focus. His shot is much more crisp, and he looks like a tiny little dinosaur, too, with dandelion carnage hanging from his razor-sharp beak. But I still thought the female deserved center stage.
Thanks for looking!