Golden-crowned Kinglet

EARLY IN 2020, my friends Kathleen and Michael flew to Seattle, rented a car, and drove to our home on the Olympic Peninsula. Kathleen had purchased a large print of Neah Bay Doves, a photograph I’d taken six months earlier, and she decided to retrieve the picture personally and drive it safely home. I hitched a ride with them back to the Bay Area and, since Michael is an enthusiastic birder, we plotted a trip that included stops at wildlife refuges along the way. A favorite was Jedidiah Smith Redwoods State Park, one of a group of parks in northern California that contain nearly half of the remaining coastal redwood forest. It is also, in my estimation, one of the most beautiful places on the planet. To get there from the north, you take a right off I-5 at Grants Pass and, after a string of all-but-abandoned rural towns, climb into gorgeous canyons that eventually form the valley of the Smith River. Just before the highway hits the Pacific coast, it twists and darkens under the canopy of Jedidiah Smith’s enormous old trees. Walking the park’s trails, you turn a corner and the light suddenly shifts or the creek suddenly reappears. Always, the giants tower above you. If you allow yourself, it’s easy to conjure elves and hobbits and other mythical creatures.

AMONG THE FOREST SPRITES are kinglets, a tiny bird that darts in and out of the brush. They rarely stay in one place for more than a second or two and are therefore one of the more difficult birds to photograph. Kinglets come in two varieties: ruby-crowned—which has a patch of red on the top of its head so small that it often goes unseen—and golden-crowned. This Golden-crowned Kinglet teased me down the trail for several minutes. Each time I raised my camera, it disappeared or the autofocus found a branch or leaf more interesting than the bird. To address this problem, I developed a technique with small birds where I follow the bird in the viewfinder and only focus at the last second when it has perched on an unobstructed branch. This kinglet had just poked its head out of the dark forest into the tunnel of light formed by the trail when I hit the shutter.

Nikon D500, 500mm, f5.6 at 1/320th second, ISO 6400

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