This time, I joined fellow wildlife enthusiast, Lynn Ie, and headed to a place I had never been to before - Hubbard Park in Meriden, Connecticut. This place is absolutely huge and we worked our way around one area with Mirror Lake being one of our main locations to hang out. Much to our surprise amid the large number of gulls, pigeons and domestic ducks, we found our first of the season female Hooded Merganser. She was taking a snooze just floating on the water for much of the time, but as the day progressed and the sun rose higher finally peaking out from behind heavy cloud cover for most of the morning, this little gal showed she could hold her own against the bigger birds.
We spent quite a bit of time in this particular area of the park before heading off to catch some landscape images of the fall foliage below Craig's Castle and other areas to the east and southeast of Mirror Lake. Here, I made use of both the standard kit lens (18-55mm) and a Canon 100mm macro lens and some filters a model horse hobby friend was able to purchase for me off of Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00AJD15PC?psc=1). There are lots of little nooks and crannies to enjoy and I have to thank Lynn for her sharp eye in noticing some of these little areas that proved worthy of some imaging.
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