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Anna's Hummingbird #1

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Anna's Hummingbird
Anna's Hummingbird
Anna's hummingbirds live in my garden here in Southern California year round. I encourage them with hummingbird feeders in my garden and the action is non-stop year round. Visitors always delight in the show. This year has been the best ever. I guess my garden must be "on the map"; in the spring there were up to 5 birds feeding at the same time.

It seems to be that in the spring during breeding season they are less territorial and feed together, but as the year progresses into summer, a dominant bird will take ownership of a feeder and stand guard over it from sunup to sundown clicking away all day long. It's a battle royal, and at times the birds actually manage to get a hold of each other and I have actually seen them wrestling on the deck! I kid you not. Mostly it's a matter of dive-bombing interlopers, and some of them will not give up easily. One night evening last week I just couldn't believe the fights going on out there with kamikaze pilot hummers bombing each other with a great cacophony of angry sounds to go with it. There are times when a bird will fly up vertically to what seems like a hundred feet or more and then will dive at immense speed making an incredible high-pitched whizzing sound with his wings.

This is a photo of one of the bosses in the garden right now. That's him standing sentry over "his" feeder. From the side their necks and heads look dark brown to black, but when they face you the light catches their features and turns them an iridescent rose color. The next post will show that. And I'll also share with you my recipe for the nectar for a hummingbird feeder.

Cannon EOS 20D
Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm
1/80 secs at f 5/6
ISO 400



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Samoan Youth

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This young man was preparing with his friends for his moment of fame on the stage at the Samoan Village at the Polynesian dance festival called Pasifika in Auckland in March this year. Samoan Youth Canon EOS 20D 1/30sec at f/20 ISO 200 Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm More photographs from the same Pasifika Festival day can be found in my new post, Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival .
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Faces of Pasifika 2007 — A Day at Auckland's Pacific Festival

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The 15th anniversary Pasifika Festival poster — a collage of the Pacific cultures the festival celebrates. On Saturday 10 March 2007, I spent the day at the Pasifika Festival at Western Springs Park in Auckland. It was the festival's 15th year — an annual celebration of Pacific Island cultures that has been part of Auckland's calendar since 1993, and which typically draws crowds of well over 100,000 across the day. Nine Pacific villages are traditionally represented — Samoa, Tonga, the Cook Islands, Niue, Fiji, Tuvalu, Tokelau, Kiribati and Tahiti — with music, dance, food, arts, and craft from each community sharing the same park for the day. I usually visit New Zealand earlier in February, but in 2007 I was there in March and it was the first — and, to date, only — time I've been able to attend Pasifika. I hope to make it back one of these years. But I came away from that single visit with the str...
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