It's suddenly early summer here in North Portland, so I drove up to the north end of North to see if there were any fun new birds showing up to enjoy the weather.
New? No, but I did find these two, a couple of new local residents, along the path to Smith and Bybee Lakes;
Great Horned Owl(lets). This one was a better photo op - the other owlet was tucked in tight next to a nearby tree trunk and screened by branches. So here's the other brother (or sister).
Both were still fairly downy, suggesting that they were no more than a day or two out of the nest. The parents were, or a parent was, probably nearby but were more experienced at hiding. Didn't see 'em.
I'm kind of foolishly pleased with this picture, because I don't have a good "birding camera", i.e. one with a telephoto lens to get up close to birds that, like the owlets, are uninterested in providing good snapshot poses. I have a cheap little phone camera, which when tried captured only a dark blob on a dark tree limb.
So I took my binoculars - and I do have good binos, Swarovski 8x42s, since while I'm not a bird photographer I am a birder and good optics are kind of a basic must-have for that - and held the phone camera up to one of the eyepieces.
It took a good bit of fiddling to get the camera and eyepiece lined up, and that doesn't even count the finger-stretch needed to push the "shutter" button, but the result is...pretty damn good. Particularly given what I had to work with.
Other than that just the usual suspects. Looks like migration hasn't really reached us yet.
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