American Three-toed Woodpecker: Sandia Crest, New Mexico, USA — On our final day in New Mexico we visited our two daughters who live in Albuquerque, and since the smoke from the fires to the west was dense in the valley, we decided to do some birding, photography, and hiking up on Sandia Crest above the city and the smoke. We hiked out along the cliff-tops on the Sandia Crest Nature Trail and then turned back through the forest just behind the cliffs. There was considerable bird activity, and among several more “to be expected” species, we tracked down this pair (perhaps and adult and juvenile or a male and female) of woodpeckers. Three-toed Woodpeckers…a somewhat rare and hard to see bird that is known to haunt the Crest. The birds were a good way back in the forest from the trail, besides being partially obscured by foreground trees. I used the full 600mm equivalent of the Sony RX10iv’s zoom, along with my custom birds and wildlife modifications to Program mode…then cropped heavily…down to maybe 1/8th of the frame and processed using my normal birds and wildlife presets in Polarr. Then I saved the images and reopened them in Pixelmator Pro to use the Machine Learning super-resolution tool to increase the file size back up to about 2/3s of a full frame, then recropped to give me something like the equivalent of a 2400-3000mm lens on a full frame camera. I mean these birds were tiny in the original frames, and only really identifiable in binoculars. Finally I used the AI processing tool in Apple Photos to add a little presence. Given the challenges, I am pretty happy with the results. At least you can see the three toes in the first shot. 🙂 ISO 100 @ f4 @ 1/640th.