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.

That new piece of camera equipment cost nearly as much as the first three piece’o’junk cars I bought as a teenager. I am still nervous to carry it around as it is rather heavy and I have a mild fear of dropping it. There is no more being discreet as this cannot be seen as a simple point-and-shoot camera. Specifically, the lens is a Canon EF 70-200mm 2.8L Image Stabilized Bazooka. I hope to get used to this thing soon, as it feels as though I am carrying around a small telescope. On one of my first early morning outings with the new lens, a fog-shrouded Goleta slough was my destination, and I snapped this photo of a great white heron perched while on the prowl for breakfast. I’m posting this photo here on the 22nd, though it wasn’t shot until the 25th, as I try to share some of my time here sans my wife.