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Red-Winged Blackbird

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Red-winged Blackbird (agelaius phoeniceus)
San Diego Creek runs through the city of Irvine from the east to the south-west where it enters the "Back Bay" of Newport Bay. It is certainly an urban creek with stretches of it that are cemented, and others that are mostly natural. The last stretch of it passes by the Irvine Ranch Water District's "wetland" where the water is diverted through a series of ponds to remove nitrates and other pollutants before sending it on its way into Newport Bay. The ponds known as the San Joachim Wetlands have been landscaped with native California plants, and are frequented by hundreds of water birds. The Audubon Society has an office and visitor center there, and it is a wonderful place to visit and hike around.
Despite the predominance of concrete along long stretches of the creek, bird life abounds. One stretch of the creek between Jefferey and Sand Canyon was until recently a micro-environment replete with birds of all kinds; mallards, herons, hawks, avocets, and many others that I don't recognize. A reed had naturalized in this stretch of the creek over the last couple of years, and this past spring red-winged blackbirds that build their nests in reeds moved in in force.
I actually ride my bike past this stretch of the creek on my way to work, and it was a joy each morning and evening riding by the birds which have a beautiful song that they call out to defend their territory. There were literally hundreds and hundreds of birds nesting in this stretch of the creek in the spring. And then along came the Irvine Company, The Evil Empire of this area of Orange County. It appears that somehow they own this stretch of the creek and while the birds were still nesting they sent in gangs who cut the reeds down. Now they have heavy equipment in the creek bed having completely destroyed the habitat and my fear is that they are going to cement the creek.
This photo was one of the many I took one Saturday morning this past spring.


Bird Photo Gallery

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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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Before and After: Two Joshua Tree Photographs, Two Painterly Reworkings

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I want to try something a little different in this post — a working walk-through of how two of my Joshua Tree photographs from April of 2011 became two of my newest painterly artworks on Redbubble. Same compositions, same landscape, same afternoon in the Mojave. Very different final pieces. The Raw Photographs Both photographs were taken on a single afternoon trip to Joshua Tree National Park, shot in Canon raw (.CR2) format on my Canon EOS. Raw files are, as any photographer knows, deliberately flat — they carry the maximum amount of information the sensor recorded, without any of the punchy contrast, saturation, or sharpening that a JPEG would apply automatically in-camera. That flatness is a feature: it gives the photographer the widest possible latitude to make choices in post-processing. But it also means a raw file, straight out of the camera, doesn't look like the scene the eye remembers. It looks like the scene the sensor saw, drained of atmosphere. Here are the two r...
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Cool Granny in Her Austin A35 — © John Corney 2026 This one has a real backstory, and I'd like to tell it properly. An Auckland Sighting On one of my annual visits home to New Zealand, I was walking through central Auckland — at the corner of Queen Street and Karangahape Road (K Road, as everyone calls it) — when a small yellow car went past me and stopped me mid-stride. It was a beautifully kept Austin A35, one of the little British runabouts that were everywhere in New Zealand when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties. Driving it was a woman of a certain age with the confident bearing of someone who had been driving that same car, or one like it, for decades. She looked entirely at home behind the wheel. She belonged to the car and the car belonged to her, and neither of them was in any hurry to change. If you know Auckland, that particular corner will register: Queen Stree...
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