Birds are a passion for us. They are everywhere all the time and searching for them hones spotting skills. Photographing them – a hobby for otherwise un-frustrated – is a digital photographers dream. You’re only limited by how much time you want to spend deleting.

Practice + Patience + Proximity = luck and maybe one or two decent photos.

That birds are well-adapted, well-evolved dinosaurs is fascinating. We live among dinosaurs – we even feed them. New fossil finds and research is indicating that birds were “bird dinosaurs” not dinosaurs who “turned into birds” after the meteor hit, and evidence of feathers goes way back in the fossil records. This article in Scientific American has terrific current findings and the Cornell University site is full of information.

Which birding books to take? All of them. Bird drawing books, personal sketch books and bird coloring books round out the library.