Shoot 2025-09-08-060658 — philthompson.me

Birds
Mandel

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Shoot 2025-09-08-060658

On my third trip out to look for them, on three separate days, I was in the right place at the right time to see my lifer Solitary Sandpiper. There were actually two. They were feeding right up along a boardwalk in a park, allowing me to get great looks and very close photos — this doesn't usually happen with lifer shorebirds!

I was able to head to a lake later that morning and see my lifer Sabine's Gull, with its terrific wing pattern and flight pattern of repeated tern-like dives down to the water.

To round out the trifecta for this gallery, I was able to see my lifer Ruff on my second attempt. This bird involved a lot of walking in mosquito-clouded heat, twice, but it was worth it! Ruff is terrific eurasian species with unusual breeding plumage and behaviors. They seem to fairly regularly take a wrong turn and end up in the US during fall migration. Like the Solidary Sandpipers and Sabine's Gull, the Ruff was pretty easy to distinguish from all the nearby usual suspects.

All of these birds are locally pretty rare, so I was fortunate to get to see them here in Oregon.

My "birds in review" collages can be found here.

Signature

📄 hashes-2025-09-08-060658.txt

📄 hashes-2025-09-08-060658.txt.sig

The above hashes-<date>.txt file contains SHA-256 hashes of all the photos from this shoot. The hashes-<date>.txt.sig is a signature of that hashes file, created with my PGP key. The signature file itself was written to both the Bitcoin Cash and Algorand blockchains, in the OP RETURN and Note fields respectively, using the transactions below. In short, this proves that these photos and the signature both existed at the time the transactions were written to the Bitcoin Cash and Algorand blockchains. This blog post has more details.

view the BCH tx on blockchair.com: b4d511580bc8f37a345996a62c057c93df3987e8b0047e2f0c67078a24440a37

view the ALGO tx on explorer.perawallet.app: NHWJ3AQI766TDIKTXLUUCGA3GF4KDFGMCYLMEA7333J5OYPY5KNQ

8:55AM Saturday August 30, 2025

Ring-billed Gull

7:43AM Sunday August 31, 2025

Belted Kingfisher

7:43AM Sunday August 31, 2025

Belted Kingfisher

7:43AM Sunday August 31, 2025

Belted Kingfisher

7:43AM Sunday August 31, 2025

Belted Kingfisher

7:43AM Sunday August 31, 2025

Belted Kingfisher

7:43AM Sunday August 31, 2025

Belted Kingfisher

7:43AM Sunday August 31, 2025

Belted Kingfisher

8:34AM Monday September 01, 2025

Solitary Sandpiper

8:35AM Monday September 01, 2025

Solitary Sandpiper

8:35AM Monday September 01, 2025

Solitary Sandpiper

8:35AM Monday September 01, 2025

Solitary Sandpiper

8:36AM Monday September 01, 2025

Solitary Sandpiper

8:36AM Monday September 01, 2025

Solitary Sandpiper

8:36AM Monday September 01, 2025

Solitary Sandpiper

The birds were too far apart to both be in focus in the shot, so I took two shots and blended them using Photoshop's "auto align layers" tool. I also painted over a distracting stick using Lightroom Classic's generative remove tool.