This is the first of what I suspect will be many photographs of bathing Bushtits during 2018. They come every day, sometimes twice a day to bathe in the fountain and are particularly fond of the bubble. I think they spend much of their time in the live oak tree in front of my house because I usually hear them tittering in the early morning when I go out to get the newspaper but the backyard is their spa. I noticed the azaleas behind the fountain start to quiver which is an indication of birds approaching the fountain. When it starts to quiver everywhere, I know it’s the Bushies who arrive in groups of ten or fifteen. I picked up my D500, with the 300mm and 1.4x TC already attached and walked toward the fountain slowly. I sat down on a garden chair about 6 feet away from the fountain and waited. One by one, they emerged from the safety of the shrubs. I even managed to get a few photographs of them getting ready to hop down from the azalea. It’s hard to photograph them there because the twigs on the azaleas are what the autofocus grabs onto, not the birds. I had to manually focus to capture the one bird.
