A Male Anna's Holds Court in Madera Canyon

I drove down to Madera Canyon in early May with a shortlist of birds in mind, and this male Anna's Hummingbird wasn't really on it. That's usually how it goes. You plan for the flashy migrants and end up spending your best hour with a bird you could photograph in your own backyard. I'm glad I did. He'd claimed a bare little twig near a stand of flowering shrubs and kept coming back to it between feeding runs, which is the kind of behavior that makes a photographer's morning.

Anna's are the year-round hummingbird a lot of Arizona folks know best. They don't clear out for winter the way our Rufous and Broad-tailed do, and the males have that outsized personality that fills a canyon. This one would launch off, chase something, and drop right back onto the same perch, always facing roughly the same direction. Once I figured out his pattern I set up, dialed in, and waited.

The gorget is the whole game with a male Anna's. That magenta-into-rose color isn't pigment, it's structural, so it only shows when the light hits at the right angle. Turn a few degrees and it goes flat black. I've watched people give up on hummingbird portraits because the throat looked dull, not realizing the bird just needed to swing his head toward the sun. Here I got lucky. He tipped his face up, the morning light caught the crown and gorget at the same time, and the color ran from copper across the top of the head down into hot pink at the throat. You can even see it bleeding onto his cheek and forehead.

Settings, since people always ask. I was shooting handheld with a long lens, wide open to melt the background into that green wash, and I pushed my shutter up to freeze him on the perch. This is a still bird, not a flight shot, so I could get away with a slightly lower speed than I'd use for wingbeats. I ran it through DxO afterward to clean up the shadows, but the color is what he actually did. I don't add saturation to a gorget. You don't need to.

The background is doing quiet work here too. All that soft green comes from the canyon foliage well behind him, and the little smear of yellow low on the right is out-of-focus light coming through leaves. Getting clean separation like that is mostly about where you stand. I moved a couple of feet left until nothing intersected his silhouette, then held my ground.

Madera Canyon rewards this kind of sitting still. If you go, don't rush past the common birds to chase the rarities. Find a perch a hummingbird likes, get low, and let the light come to you. Some of my favorite frames from that canyon are of birds I already knew by heart.