My Front Yard

Lately I’ve been home a lot so I’m sharing a few of my favorite shots from my own front yard and a few city parks that I have easy access to. If you are a budding wildlife photographer and you haven’t done this, I highly recommend working your own yard or whatever patch of dirt you can find within walking distance. Photographing my backyard wildlife is how I learned to see the magic in the mundane, which might be half the battle.

Dark-eyed Junco

I put some birdseed on a rock in my yard and experimented with backlight and perspective. This image took me three days to capture and it was the first time I succeeded in using foreground, backlight, and spectral highlights. The bokeh in the background came from sun shining through water droplets on some ornamental grasses in my flowerbed.

Female Mallard

Mallard duck resting in the bushes near a city pond. I was laying in the wood chip mulch a few feet away from the sidewalk. The ducks were accustomed to being fed by people and let me get quite close.

Broad-tailed Hummingbird

Hummingbird visiting my balcony feeder with the sunset in the distance.

Woodhouse's Scrub Jay

Woodhouse’s Scrub Jay on my patio table. This is a staged photo: I had been cutting sunflowers and got the idea to put the flowers on the table with some birdseed and hope for somebody to come check it out.

California Quail

California Quail sheltering during a snowstorm in the trees and landscaping rocks in my front yard. When I took this photo I was laying in my driveway and hiding behind the recycle bin.

Evening Grosbeak

Evening Grosbeak female in a crabapple tree. These birds were visiting a feeder in my dad’s yard.

California Quail Female

California Quail peaking through the legs of my patio furniture. A little family had wandered across my patio picking up the dropped birdseed. They walked in single file, so I have an almost identical photo of the male as he passed through the same spot.

Bee and Russian Sage

Bees are fascinating and beautiful subjects, and you can find them anywhere there are flowers, all summer long. Learning their species is a challenge I have not yet accepted! I think this one is a honey bee.

Red Squirrel

Red Squirrel in the park near where I dropped my kid off for school.

Green Bee

Bee visiting my Russian Sage. The light was eerie due to wildfire smoke in the area, creating all sorts of backlit ambience as the sun shone through the layered vegetation.

Green Bee on a Sunflower

Broad-Tailed Hummingbird

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Lesser Goldfinch

Lesser Goldfinch eating sunflower leaves in my yard. I didn’t know they ate the leaves, but they seem to be a favorite food early in summer before the seeds come ripe.

Cedar Waxwing

Cedar Waxwing picking up crabapples from my driveway. Two snow shovels are leaning against the garage, making the blue and yellow background. My van was parked in the driveway, making a nice blind for me to hide behind.

Fly

Some kind of fly. They are gorgeous, right?

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This was from a city park. This hummingbird was regularly returning to this flowering thistle so I parked myself in the best position to get the bokeh through the bushes and waited.

Woodhouse's Scrub Jay

Sunflowers growing near my patio are what made the bright yellow background.

Woodhouse's Scrub Jay

Dark-Eyed Junco

Magpie

When I posted these images on Instagram I got a lot of comments about how lucky I am to have such a beautiful yard. It’s true! I am lucky to get a lot of species for a few reasons. I live within a mile of the mountains with lots of natural habitat, which is probably the most important reason for the diversity I get. The foothills nearby are covered in sagebrush habitat and native scrub oaks, which bring the Scrub Jays and Quail. My yard itself offers some things for birds too: I have mature trees and shrubs for birds to shelter. I’ve got lots of plants that bring in birds and bees, including crabapple, native sunflowers, and perennial flowers. My plantings are not all native species, but I’ve kept it to plants that are either native or well-adapted to my growing area. I sometimes put out bird seed. I hang a hummingbird feeder in the spring.

Still, my yard is a pretty typical suburban lot for my area. It’s about 0.2 acres, and surrounded by other 0.2 acre lots built up since the 1950s with houses and streets and a major freeway a few blocks away. When I started photographing wildlife, I was pretty sure that all I would ever photograph in my yard would be House Finches and American Robins. But when I started paying attention, I was surprised at how many species I actually had! Here are a few of the bird species I’ve seen in my yard:

American Robin
House Finch
Song Sparrow
Collared Dove
Starling
Black-capped Chickadee
Mountain Chickadee
Dark-eyed Junco
Scrub Jay
American Goldfinch
Lesser Goldfinch
Cassin’s Finch
Pine Siskin
Black-headed Grosbeak
Cedar Waxwing
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Magpie
Spotted Towhee
California Quail
Downy woodpecker
Northern Flicker
American Kestrel
Cooper’s Hawk
Black-chinned Hummingbird
Broad-tailed Hummingbird

I haven’t come close to photographically exhausting all of the potential in my yard. If I expand my range to include birds at city parks and ponds within 15 minutes of my house, I get a lot more songbirds and a few species of waterfowl too. If you consider insects and mammals, I’ve got so much wildlife in my reach that I could probably never do it all justice.