Upde Designs

Good Day.  Great day yesterday.  Got to see the Grand Kids, Angie, and Ben, bought a new car, and got some great pictures for the blog.  Oh and still had time for a Saturday afternoon nap. 🙂

I’ve bought my share of cars over my life time mostly used and some new.  I can tell you most of the time it was not a pleasant experience.  I have been looking for a few weeks and have dealt with a couple of dealers and while I won’t go into any details let’s just say that I was less than happy with how I was treated and their response.  Yesterday was “hands down” the best car buying experience I’ve ever had.  More on that in a later post.

So after all the shopping and visiting was done Jeanne and decided to go look for a picture of the day for my 365 project.  The light was getting orange and soft so we drove down to our favorite place, the 16th street basin.  We wanted to see if there was more water in it since our last visit.

We were blown away with what we saw.  Hundreds of pelicans, lots of ducks, blue herons, and coots.  I have never seen so many pelicans.  They all had this strange growth on their bills.  Here’s what I learned with a Google search.  “White Pelicans are one of North America’s largest birds and have an 8-9 foot wing span. They are pure white with just black wing tips and a large yellow-orange bill. During breeding season, they have pale yellow crests and a flat rounded horn-like growth on the ridge of their bill.  This growth is only found during breeding season and is shed after their eggs have been laid. Immature birds are paler with a gray to flesh colored bill, pale orange legs and a brownish color to the wing tips. They have brownish eyes and have a gray-brown patch on their heads and neck.  They resemble adults by their second year.  They are larger than the Brown Pelican and males are larger than females.”

I have lots of images from yesterday.  I’ll show some of them later in the week.  We ended up spending about an hour and a half at the basin and didn’t go anywhere else.  We finally ran out of daylight so it was time to go home.  I made about 480 images while there.  Unfortunately I only had the 28 – 300 mm lens, which is a good walk around lens but not very good for shooting wildlife.  Every once in a while we would think about leaving to go somewhere else but the light was so perfect and it was so much fun watching all the wildlife doing their thing that we just stayed and enjoyed the sights.

Finished up the day with a little Lambrusco, burgers on the grill and some brownies.  Hope you had a great day as well.  Enjoy your Sunday.  Thanks for stopping by the blog and be careful.