Armed with my new superlens it was off to the beach for some bird photos. A thick fog hovered over the coast while homeless people slept nearby, scattered across the sand. The strange thing about Santa Barbara: the average home is worth well over a million dollars, the views are priceless, and rents are exorbitant, but the perfect weather makes the streets and beaches a mecca for the homeless. But I wasn’t here to photograph heads sticking out of sleeping bags; I came for shorebirds. Brown pelicans, cormorants, terns, seagulls, plovers, herons, ducks, some really amazing black skimmers, and, of course, the curlew, which are in abundance.

This weekend, Caroline will join me, and I’ll bring her down to the shore to watch the birds bathe, eat, fly about, and otherwise put on a great show – for those of us who like this sort of thing.

This is the black skimmer that I posted a few days ago in the early morning light while a group of them were feeding.

The black-back gull waits, always on the lookout for someone to drop some food or a kid to pull a piece of bread out of their pocket.

And finally, a grey plover doing what it always does: running.