So, it is Friday the 13th, and that very long word in the title that starts with “t” means “fear of the number 13” or perhaps, according to some authorities “fear of Friday the 13th.” Granted these pics were taken on the 12th, but I am posting them here, today, as a antidote to phobia of any shape or manner on this good Friday.

I have been, in my off hours at the Biggest Week in American Birding, photographing warblers with my Point and Shoot camera from the boardwalk at Magee Marsh along the Ohio shore of Lake Erie.  Lots of fun, if somewhat frustrating due to the limits of the camera…but probably not much more frustrating…given the difficulty of the subjects…than photographing them with any kind of camera.

Scarlet Tanagers began to come through in numbers on Wednesday. I was photographing members of a small group of them, with the camera set on my own devised flight mode (user setting, which in this case maybe is warbler mode) which includes 5 frames captured at 8 frames per second. I just happened to press the shutter just as this bird’s wings went up. The rest is just mechanics…with, perhaps, a bit of help from Lightroom (I only edited the first shot, and then, for absolute consistency, pasted my edit settings over the next 4). Of course, if I had been trying to catch this sequence, it would never have happened! This is pure serendipity.

There ought to be a word, actually, for this kind of event…which is certainly not dumb luck…considering the amount of time I have spent behind the camera, and the amount of experience and experimentation that has gone into my choice of equipment and settings, and the amount of practice I have had over the past 3 weeks in catching action with my latest equipment. I could not have been more prepared for this sequence if I had actually planned it. And I was in the right place at the right time (which is largely a matter of being out with the camera a lot!) So, while I would not credit it any great amount of skill on my part, this sequence is not really luck at all. We need a better word even than serendipity, which has come to imply simply accidental discovery, or we need to return to the original meaning as Horace Walpole coined it: he said he formed it from the Persian fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip, whose heroes "were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of". (Wikipedia, emphasis mine). When you are in the field any amount of time, things do, for sure, just happen…but you definitely have to be ready for them to happen if anything is to come of them.

Nikon Coolpix P500 at 668mm equivalent field of view, f6.3 @ 1/800th @ ISO 160. User Flight mode.

Processed for Clarity and Sharpness and cropped for composition in Lightroom.