The day dawned hot, muggy and foggy. After a strong overnight thunderstorm, the windows in our house were so steamed up that I could not see the closest feeder that’s barely 10 feet away outside. As the sun started to burn through the haze, I drove to Veteran’s Park in Hamilton, in hopes of finding a few birds that I hadn’t seen this June.
The park usually has some sea gulls flying around, but not today, and my June count thus has none of them. The first birds I saw were a pair of great blue herons slinking along the shore of the lake that covers a good stretch of the park. I pulled up my camera but couldn’t see anything but gray through the lens, which I assumed had fogged.
It turned out, what was fogged was my brain.
I used my T-shirt to wipe the viewfinder glass clean, then pointed my camera. The red focus point came on but the camera wouldn’t fire, despite repeated attempts. I used my shirt to wipe the lens, which, oddly, didn’t look fogged, and the shutter still wouldn’t click.
At that point, I decided to keep walking, hoping that the camera — which had been in my air-conditioned car on the 20-minute drive to the park — would clear up after adjusting to the changed environment. No dice.
Only after I got home did I discover that a switch on the lens had somehow tripped over to a setting that limits the focusing distance to 10 meters. Once again, operator error was the cause of the malfunction, and I scolded myself for not checking my settings when I started the day.
The switch reset to infinity, I ventured out to the Pole Farm this afternoon, and the camera worked fine. The temperature and the humidity were both in the high 80s, and the birds surely were as hot and sticky as I was. On the way out the trail, I spotted the catbird depicted above having a good splash in a big puddle. As I headed back to my car, more birds — a female cardinal, a song sparrow and another catbird — were taking a dunk in the puddle.
I wish I could have joined them.
The Jersey Birder 