Day 14.149: Birds at East Point Sanctuary

I recently bought a new camera (body). It's pretty close to being an updated (8 years later) version of my old DSLR. I'm very excited about its low-light performance and its ability to do video, but neither of those features were relevant on its first outing when we walked at East Point Audubon Sanctuary on Saturday morning. It was a test of the 24 rather than 10 megapixel resolution and its speed however.

Here are some of the birds we saw.

A double-crested cormorant fighting its way upwind:

Chimney swifts - they are related to common swifts as we often see in the UK, but I just learned that swifts and swallows are not closely related - their similarities being an example of convergent evolution:

Two house finches. As usual I had to look pretty hard to decide that they were not purple finches, but I'm fairly sure.

A tree swallow:

A yellow warbler - a first time identification for me I think.

Some common eider (at a fair distance):

A singing chickadee:

A loudly singing yellowthroat:

An even louder song sparrow:

And finally these two that I wish I could have got closer to - maybe a grebe? 

A pretty good set of sightings for a short visit and a good first outing for the camera too!