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Hummingbird Calypte Anna #2

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Anna's hummingbird Calypte Anna
Anna's Hummingbird
(Calypte Anna)
The previous post I made of a photo of a Anna's hummingbird was taken side-on and the feathers of the neck and head are a brownish black. Here we see our little beauty, whose official name is "Calypte Anna", facing us which shows how the color of his neck and head features display as a bright rose. I presume this scares off other competitors for the nectar feeder as they come barrelling down on any intruders.

It is quite inexpensive to feed hummingbirds in your yard. Once you have bought the feeder from your local garden nursery or hardware store, you can make the nectar yourself at home with ordinary white sugar. Here's my recipe for hummingbird feeder nectar: make a 25% solution of white sugar and water. That's it! So for example, I make 8 cup batches at a time, so I first of all measure out 2 cups of sugar and then add 6 cups of warm water to make up a total of 8 cups. Stir it for long enough to dissolve the sugar. It doesn't need to be colored; I know in the stores it's sold with red food coloring in the solution, but the hummers will be attracted by the fake flowers and colors on the feeder itself. Do NOT use powdered (icing) sugar!

How do you attract hummingbirds to your garden feeder? Well, first of all you have to live in an area where hummingbirds live. In warmer parts of the US some varieties, such as the Anna pictured above, don't migrate at all and you will delight in seeing them in your garden year-round. In colder parts, you may only have them during a season. So, presuming you live in an area with hummingbirds, just buy a feeder, fill it with nectar solution, and hang it from a tree branch or other convenient spot. It may take a few weeks for the birds to find it, but once they have, you'll have them as long as you feed them. And once you start, you shouldn't stop as they will come to rely on you especially in the winter and spring.

Canon EOS 20D
Canon 70-300mm lens at 300mm
1/30 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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The Watchman and Virgin River — Painterly Winter Landscape

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The Watchman and Virgin River, Zion National Park — Painterly Winter Landscape — © John Corney The Watchman is one of Zion National Park's most recognizable formations — the peak that rises up just past the south entrance, often photographed reflected in or framed by the Virgin River as it winds through the valley floor. I photographed this view on the same January 2006 trip as the other winter Zion piece in this collection, with the river running low and the cottonwoods and willows along the bank stripped bare for the season. I worked this one up with AI assistance into a full painterly interpretation, the same way I've approached the rest of this Zion series — directing the process the way a film director works with a cinematographer, choosing what to carry forward from the original photograph and what to push harder. Here that meant leaning into the warmth of the low winter light against the cool snow on the upper ridgeline, and letting th...
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