A task that fell off my radar long ago was to create a bird photography gallery for various backyard, songbirds, grassland birds, blackbirds, etc, that didn’t quite fit into the other segmented categories I had. But I didn’t know what to call this new gallery because it was a mix of birds, certainly not all in my backyard. I also found a lot of photographs, some being favorites, that were offline for a bit since I converted 83 photo galleries back in 2018.

So this new sub-gallery is simply called Passerines, or Perching Birds. Given there are 6500 species in this order and 140 families – it gives me a lot of leeway on what to place here until I have enough of any particular family to segment it off again. Most of your typical backyard birds fall in this order.

I have not done much bird photography in the past few years, so revisiting some of this older work was nice. Much of it was photographed using my old D2X camera (ancient by today’s standards!), and it wasn’t the greatest at handling noise at higher ISOs. Modern technology comes to the rescue to “remaster” a few of these older images to make them a bit cleaner and sharper. Once again, I stand in awe of what Topaz Sharpen AI can do.

I even pulled in a few older film images, like one of my favorites of this Song Sparrow, (Melospiza melodia) in an area filled with bullrushes. I photographed it at Fish Point Wildlife Area off Saginaw Bay, Michigan, and loved the early morning lighting. I also prefer bird photos that convey a sense of their habitat.

Typically, I have found some modern software plugins don’t do well cleaning up film-based images. But this was an exception; Topaz Sharpen AI worked well enough for me. The photo is from 2002!

I also stumbled upon this photo of a Red-Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus) I photographed at the well-known and popular Kensington Metropark. It was an undeveloped photo, just lying in wait since 2006. The local news amongst bird watchers this past week is that red-winged blackbirds, usually a harbinger of spring, are now being seen and heard in abundance. However, it’s not even the end of February yet! They were calling away in the vernal pond behind our house. The early birds may still be subject to a “March surprise” snowstorm – it isn’t completely unheard of. But we may also not see much more of winter this year. I am going to count on the birds knowing best.

Then, the last image I wanted to highlight my omission goof on is one of my ten favorites from 2007. This Eastern Meadowlark perched on a cedar tree might still be one of my favorite bird photos I’ve made. I like how the composition ended up, the flaring of the tail, and the song. I was extremely fortunate to have the meadowlark land on this particular cedar, far enough away from everything else to provide an excellent, clean background. You’d think I would be sure to include all of my yearly favorites when changing galleries – but … nope!

So, all this has made me a little self-conscious about what else I have overlooked. Frankly, I am unsurprised – it was a very tedious exercise, needing to redo and resize older work. It is also challenging to compare online inventory to your drive inventory – but hindsight tells me I should have made checklists. Despite being offline for perhaps as much as five years, at least it gave me the chance to take another look at them to see if they would benefit from a bit of touchup.