This morning i woke up at sunrise and drove down to the community garden. I unlocked the gate and had the whole place to myself. I dug out my pop up blind and office chair from behind our garden bed where it has sat since last fall. I could see where the mice have been gnawing on the chair gathering nesting material. I popped up the blind and set it up about ten feet away from the bird feeder overhanging our plant bed. I restocked the bird feeder with peanuts, sunflower seeds and a suet cake and sat down to wait. While waiting I prefocused my camera on the perch clamped above the feeder. I set my ISO to 3200 as the was no direct sunlight yet. I put my F stop at F 8.0 to allow the background to blur out. I was a bit of a wait before the first bird arrived. A California Scrub Jay. First thing it did was dive down to the feeder and grab a peanut which it promptly buried in the garden plot next to ours. After that it made numerous trips back and forth to the feeder and various places around the garden. It stopped quite a number of times on the perch allowing me to compose and grab a few quick images. All total I was in the blind about an hour before the lighting got too bright to continue. I took only twenty seven images. This one was my favorite. Canon R6 MKII camera with a Canon RF 100-500mm lens at 200mm. My camera settings were AV mode, ISO 3200, F 8.0 at 1/800th of a sec. Camera was on a tripod and gimbel.
