Palm Warbler: Cape May NJ

Nothing beats a sunny morning in Cape May after the passage of a front in the night. The birds pile up at places like the Meadows, Higbee Beach, and the dike. They are so busy feeding they pay little attention to us. This is in the overgrown meadows at Higbee. A Palm Warbler. It does not get any better than this!

Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 160 @ f6.3. Processed and cropped slightly in Lighroom on my Windows tablet.

Part of what attracts me to birds and bird photography is intricate detail of feathers. Good binoculars or a good camera can catch every little interlocking barb of the flight and body feathers, and every plume of the downy breast. If you are on a tablet or have a touch screen, zoom in on the back of this bird. (If not click to open in another window and zoom.) See what I mean? Every barb!

I find it satisfying that the beauty of a bird can be appreciated from the form and color of the living creature, the active aliveness of it that you can see with the naked eye, right down to the unlikely design of feathers. And of course I find it hard to imagine that any amount of chance and natural selection could have ever resulted in anything as amazing as a feather. On the other hand, I can easily imagine that the feather was created, was actively designed by an intelligence, and more than that, an intelligence with a sense of wonder and delight…a loving intelligence with a true appreciation of functional beauty. While I might feel a kinship with that intelligence, expressed in my own sense of wonder and delight, I know that the feather is so far beyond my power to conceive that I can only be awe of such a being, of such love. I don’t believe because of the feather. My belief is based on a living encounter with love itself, but the feather certainly conforms to my faith, is another chime in the great chord of faith that informs my life.

It is, unfortunately, all too easy for the pressures and confusions of daily life to obscure my faith, to mute the chord…but a day with the birds, and few images like this one…a few feathers always serves to bring faith, and my sense of wonder, swelling to the full. Happy Sunday!