More on northern California photography

Spent a late afternoon at Gray Lodge wildlife refuge hoping to get some good closeups of waterfowl. This is an 8400 acres of wetland about 8 miles southeast of Gridley, California and approximately 60 miles north of Sacramento. The refuge enjoys the Sutter Buttes (worlds shortest mountain range) as a backdrop. I thought we'd be in luck as there was a white heron standing about 20 feet off the road when we turned onto the access road, but that was about as close as we'd get to any birds. We drove the auto loop and there were a good number of ducks, and tried walking down a side access path trying to sneak up on a heron and other water fowl. I was shooting with a 100mm-400mm zoom with 1.4 teleconverter and wished for more! The fading light soon proved that the f4.5 - 5.6 lens (with the loss of 1 additional stop due to tele-converter) wasn't going to work out. In the 90 minutes we spent stalking some birds we did witness some close fly bys of a heron, buzzard, owl, pheasant, and other fowl. I did get a couple of decent shots of the golden light during sunset, but was still pretty disappointed at my overall lack of any decent images.

Doing some more research on the web indicates that the best time to go to Gray Lodge is December - January during the peak migratory time. It was a pleasure to be there without a ton of other people and next time I'll want to check out the blind structures that I've read about that might provide a better (and warmer) place to photograph from. For more info on Gray Lodge check out http://www.dfg.ca.gov/lands/wa/region2/graylodge/index.html