Fauxto Friday - "Pack of Peckers"

Another Friday, another beautiful bird fauxto! I’ve spoken before of the magical backyard I’m fortunate to have. I rarely have to travel outside its boundaries to find spectacular displays of flora and fauna. While I spent most of the last year with my lens focused on flowers and insects, this spring I’m all about the birds. I’ve gotten in the practice of using the “thousand-yard stare” to more easily detect each tiny movement and flutter hidden among the branches…a necessity now that the leaves have really filled in the spaces.

I’m sure we’ve always had this wide variety of birds flitting around the yard, but since I didn’t train my eye on them, I pretty much wrote them all off as sparrows, robins and blackbirds. Now that I’m really paying attention, I can see there are also Brown-headed Cowbirds, Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, Indigo Buntings, European Starlings, Red-winged Blackbirds, Baltimore Orioles, Chickadees, Juncos, American Goldfinches, Mallards, Canada Geese, several types of Woodpeckers, and the occasional turkey, among others. And those are just the ones I’ve seen so far…I know there are a lot more out there!            

There is one particular spot in the yard I think of as my own little slice of Narnia…I’ve seen more birds, insects and animals (including a mink!) in this area than any other. So it was no surprise to be sitting there, soaking up all that love from Mother Nature and look up to see a beautiful Red-headed Woodpecker going to work on an old sycamore tree.

This beauty must have flown back and forth around this tree 30 times…it’s pretty easy to feel like these magical and wondrous shows are just for me and my camera. I snapped off 20-25 shots of this woodpecker in flight. I loved how the black, white and red feathers contrasted so colorfully against the blue sky. If only there were multiple woodpeckers flying around at once! 😎😎

You know what that means…. enter my good buddy Photoshop!

This was one of my quickest editing sessions…I was so happy with the original photos that not a lot of retouching was needed. Using the picture with the bird perched on the tree as the main background, I used the Magnetic Lasso tool to select only the flying bird from each of the other three pictures and pasted those selections into separate layers on the main background. My selection area extended a little beyond the bird, leaving blue sky sections that didn’t quite match the tone of the background sky. Rather than recolor, I simply used the Eraser tool to remove those sections. All that remained was a little fine-tuning of the crop and arrangement of birds to better align them to the Rule of Thirds and Golden Spiral grids and voila! Fauxto Finish!

Thanks for reading all the way to the end! 😘