La Gran Aventura Day 34: 300 birds!

Saturday, January 13, 2024

This morning I woke up and was totally fixated on the idea of going birding and catching the sunrise. So I hopped in the car and drove down to the Provo River Trail on Geneva Rd. It was a really nice walk -- very, very cold. There weren’t a ton of birds out, but I saw a few and went over 300 birds on my life list. The new birds I saw today were the Pied-billed Grebe, the California Quail (#300!), the American Widgeon, and the Gadwall. It feels like quite an accomplishment. I tried to get a good shot of Timpanogos, but the clouds wouldn’t clear, and the light wasn’t right. I’ll get a good one before I leave town. I did get the sunrise and clouds over Mt Buckley, and I ran into the BYU men’s distance running team accompanied by my good friend Dustin Bybee and followed by my other good friend, Coach Ed Eyestone. It was fun to see them.

I spent a bunch of time during the rest of the day trying to figure out how to focus stack, which is when you take two photographs that are focused on two different things, and then you blend them together in Photoshop. For some reason it wasn’t really working for me for a while, but now it is.

In the afternoon we went to Lamon’s house to watch the BYU basketball game. They played UCF on the road, and they picked up their first Big 12 win. It was fun to watch the Cougs play well again.

After that we came back to the house and played spoons together. It’s such a fun game.

Then I took Kimball to get some new pants -- the ones he brought are worn out now.

In the evening we watched the film Sound of Freedom. It’s one that has been recommended to me many times. It was tough to watch, but I’m glad I did.