More Blue Grass.....

Blue Grass is always worth a visit at any time of year, but I think it gets best as fall approaches. This large acreage of stripper pit lakes and meadows is full of activity, but not always easy to photograph. I saw lots of butterflies in the meadow areas, but they are very lumpy ankle-turning fields and I have lots of butterfly photos, already.....so we just drove along looking for birds.Down the middle of the gravel roads we saw about 8 birds scurrying around along the edges and back and forth across the road. I guessed them for Horned Larks and was correct. I never seem to get good photos of them. My camera (or its operator) has a terrible time dealing with anything in gravel or a grassy field...can't seem to find the focus most of the time to sort out what is there.
This was my best shot out of 50 or more! I had the car door open and Mike was slowly creeping along the road. The larks didn't seem to mind too much and let the car get fairly close. Mike would stop and I would lean out and shoot which ever bird was closest. What a way to take photos!

Another one showing some of the black at the neck.

The road in that area is right next to several farm fields....corn and beans both. Looks like the field corn is pretty ripe.

The next area had a Harrier swooping low over the field (see small gray bird in photo center). Sometimes they come fairly close, but this one was following a lake edge going away from me.

And this is what you get when you are too slow getting the camera focused....the whitetail of a very pretty little young deer. I wasn't expecting a deer and didn't even have the camera turned on! Duh!

I should not post this shot...it is out of focus....but I wanted to show the variety of birds that were awaiting us in my favorite parking lot. There were about a dozen Mourning Doves, several Killdeer and more of the Horned Larks all grazing in the gravel! I've never seen the doves hanging around with this bunch before. The Killdeer and Horned Larks are often in this lot. I think they are mostly all young birds.

My best shot was the back of a dove that was too dumb to fly away when the rest did.

Two more doves.

A path leading down to one of the many lakes. Most of the lakes are long and skinny. There are usually fishermen on all of them, so we were pretty lucky to see as much as we did. We usually try to go in the hours when many people are at work.

This Kingbird had picked a very nice little Oak tree for his perch and was making short jumps into the air to catch bugs. We saw lots of bug catchers. Swallows were swooping all over the place, but I can never catch up with them when they are on the move...but I love watching how graceful they are.

One of the Kingbird jumps...sort of.

Another tree top sitter! This time it was a Meadowlark.
When I managed to get something in focus the late afternoon light was lovely, but it sure made it hard for me to get most of my shots if anything moved.

Several Goldfinches were coming to the edge of this shallow lake to get drinks. We have seen them there before.

Synchronized drinking :-)

Well...the light was getting to be in my eyes with every shot, but the moon was way up already. Time to go home and have supper!