Early arriving Hoodeds

I take a lot of pictures, often more than a couple hundred a day, and, since I pretty much know what I'm doing and I travel with decent dSLR cameras and lenses, there's really no excuse for posting any less-than-reasonably-stellar images. Oh, viewers of this blog may disagree with eye-of-the-beholder things like composition, but I think it's fair to say that my posts are all properly exposed and sharpened shots. So why this grainy, soft—heck, fuzzy—photo of something that may or may not be a bird in the background? Well, today was not a photography day, but when I was coming back from grocery shopping in the late afternoon, I happened to notice a small flock of Hooded Mergansers on a local river. All I had with me was my weatherproof Fuji, which, though it takes fine images under the right circumstances, is definitely not up to the task of capturing distant birds in dim light. But there was no time to dash home to retrieve the right equipment and return to the scene, and there was no guarantee the Hoodeds would wait around, so I went with what I had. The compromise result, however imperfect, is a record of a newly arrived migrant—and the start of the waterfowl march north.