The Yellow Bellied Sapsucker

UPDATE: I corrected the bird type, misheard A. It's a Yellow Bellied Sapsucker, not a Red Breasted Sapsucker.

This is my first attempt at shooting birds (with a camera). Taking a photo of a bird takes a lot of patience -- and probably a lot of practice. I really worked some custom focus settings of the camera, setting a thumb-button to control the focus.

This is a yellow bellied sapsucker (according to A. and this website: yellow-bellied sapsucker -- I like my photo more). He was really shy. We were inside and could see him fly to a tree in the back yard and every time I'd try to sneak up on him, he'd fly away. Then, I'd walk inside and by the time I got back in the kitchen, he was back. Then I pulled a chair out to the lawn and sat in it for about an hour and made about 80 frames, most misses.

This is a heavily cropped photo, even though I shot it with a 400mm focal length on a 1.6x image senor. I then had to take the photo into Photoshop and apply A LOT of selective sharpening on just the bird to get some of the details of the feathers to show.

While, I'm not going to ditch my Ken Coles and Jack Spade bags anytime soon to become a bird watcher. (Though this is contrary to the evidence I've presented her by bothering to look up a birder website). It was a relaxing way to spend some time in the sun without an Internet connection, nor sitting on my bike. It was just me, my camera, nature.