Birding BC: condo day 2

I had all kinds of plans to join a local birding group on an outing this morning, but apparently my back disagreed.  So, after appropriate amounts of aspirin, heating pad and sleeping in, I went out to check out the bay just a few feet from our condo.  Again, I missed the high tide but got another shot of a female merganser fishing close in and since she was apparently trying to drown it, or wash it really well, I got several good shots of her with her fresh caught lunch.  But first, I have to share the new bird for the year, a small red-breasted sapsucker.  I heard the pecking on the tree and spent a few minutes trying to find him.

Once I found him, I had to try and get the camera to focus on the bird, not the branches.  As you can see above, there are a lot of branches.  I threw away about a dozen bad shots before I got the technique I needed down pretty well.

And here's a nice one of the merganser having lunch.  Once I figure out how to crop my photos in gimp, I'll probably do a post with the series of photos of her fussing with her fish before she eats it.

I'm hoping to add a few more birds to my year list while we're here.  I'll be doing some research on ebird and see what the group saw today and see if there's any birds I'd particularly like to see.  Right now, I'm going to go search through the scoter pictures and see if there's a black scoter lurking amongst all the surf scoters.  Here's to getting lucky on vacation!