My newest project for the upcoming year will be a "Big Photo Year" with the goal being the capturing of at least 350 species on "film" from January 1st through December 31st of the calendar year 2014. The ground rules will be simple…..no old photos allowed. Only images which are readily identifiable as a specific species will be counted. The shots won't necessarily have to be "great", but I certainly will make every effort to make each and every shot as worthy of publication as possible. I've had year-lists for at least a decade now and I do keep a life-list as well as a photo life-list. But the challenge here will be to see how many species I can collect in one single year. Between now and January 1st, I'll start planning on places to visit to get the most diverse collection of birds to photograph. As I move along, I'll post interesting shots of places I plan to revisit once 2014 begins.
One such place will certainly be the sod farms of Orange County New York where I captured this less than brilliant but fine for documentation purposes image of a Snowy Owl. It was overcast, snowing, and the bird was distant, but nonetheless, you can tell it's a snowy. These birds are not common to our area and would be a welcome addition when trying to amass a decent number of species for the year count. Keep your screens tuned to natdigital.blogspot.com and I promise not to leave you hanging.
The Snowy owl of Skinners Lane, Pine Island, NY captured on 11/25/13:
