A Shameless Request

I don't have anything particularly interesting coming up in this post but just wanted to take the opportunity to thank the newest follower of it, Chris, (Thanks Chris!  I hope you found it worth your time) and to thank all of you who read it and find some sort of interest or value from it.

I do enjoy the opportunity and excuse to learn more about photography, practice my writing skills, and learn or relearn things about the natural world so I also personally get some value from doing this.  But now for the shameless request:  If any of you like what I'm doing here, please pass it on to anyone who you think would enjoy it as well by any means you please whether through social media or otherwise.  I don't have the attention span to spend too much time at the computer and must be too misanthropic to participate in social media so have a pretty limited outreach.  Also, at your convenience, let me know what you liked, didn't like, what would be better, more interesting, or just requests for future posts.  You can do that either by commenting in the post or emailing me at wrangellbob@gmail.com. 
And become a follower!  (I've always thought that "follower" is one of the worst words to use in this sort of context, sounds a bit too cultish to me!)

Thanks again to all of you for your interest and time!

And, just to add some visuals to this, here are a few bird nerd photos from the recently ended 2018 Wrangell Stikine River Birding Festival as well as a few random photos I don't think I've posted before.

I hope spring is springing wherever you are!

A Golden Crowned Sparrow from my bedroom window.  A flock of dozens of these guys decimated a suet cake over the course of a day and caused me to nearly be late for work as I was trying to get some decent shots of them in the morning and didn't keep a very close watch on the clock!  (On a completely unrelated subject, do you know where the word "decimate" originated?  It's a brutally fascinating history that I learned from a podcast called Dan Carlin's Hardcore History which I extremely highly recommend.  "Decimate" came from the Roman Legion days and was a form of punishment imposed on units that were mutinous, cowardly, or in some other ways, had grossly underperformed.  The unit was divided into groups of 10 and then one soldier out of each group of 10 was randomly selected to be beaten to death by the other 9 as punishment for the whole group.)   Luckily, I don't live far from work and can make it there in about 3 minutes if I really book it on my bike.

These are a type of sandpiper called Dunlins.  There have been huge flocks of them up on the delta the last week.  One of the interesting and helpful peculiarities of the migration of shorebirds on the Stikine delta is that many of them are already in their breeding plumage which greatly simplifies identification.  These Dunlins are easy to identify by the black breast and belly.

This is a Western Sandpiper which is one the smallest but most prolific of the migrating shorebirds here.  These guys are only 5 or 6 inches long but can be found in flocks numbering in the many thousands as they murmurate across the sky like a school of bait fish transposed into an inverse environment.

The following are just some random patterns on a sand bar from the Stikine River taken last summer and one decomposing salmon head freshly dug up out of the sand by a foraging Raven who left his tracks behind while practicing proper wilderness etiquette of "Take only pictures, leave only footprints".