When You Forget To Charge Your Battery

I recently went on a birding expedition with my buddies Laurence Butler and Dominic Sherony.  We went to Mesquite Wash and Mount Ord in the northeastern section of Maricopa County.  This is an awesome area to bird, but.....I forgot my to charge my camera battery.  So this post has very limited photographs, but with some good memories.  And I'm stupid!

We stopped at Mesquite Wash first, hoping to get Laurence his first ever Harris's Sparrow.  This Harris's Sparrow was my Maricoper a few days before.  The sparrow flock was flighty and challenging to find, but with the help of Pierre Deviche, we got to see the sparrow, and Laurence got his lifer!  The Harris's didn't cooperate for photos, but we did get this Black-throated Sparrow to cooperate...

Going up to Mount Ord, the lower slopes of the mountain were filled with the bouncing ball song of the Black-chinned Sparrow.  This was only the second photograph I took during the day.

At Mount Ord we found a handful of forest birds, which included our first Painted Redstart of the year as well as a few Hutton's Vireos.  Despite a long attempt at trying to call in a Northern Pygmy Owl, we failed.  We then went down to Sunflower, and were glad to find Violet-green Swallows beginning to nest.  This guy was awesome to see, and quickly made way to find his home for the year!

Yes, this is my hole!  Despite my less than 5% of battery, I managed to fight the camera's strict operations and shoot a few shots of the swallow. This was after the camera denied me any further shots after one.  Dominic and I closed the day out with one more highlight after Laurence took off, a nice American Goldfinch! 

4 Species photographed under a nearly bad battery.  Not bad, but learn from my lesson!