Welcome to WingsandWonder.com. The website holds a selection of bird photos I've taken over the past five years. To learn more about me and the story behind Wingsandwonder.com, please take a look at my blog.
I've reserved this space to talk about navigating this website. First, a little bit about the "home" page. It's a slide show. It takes longer than it should for the pictures to start rotating. Your patience will be rewarded.
I've chosen to use bird themes and bird photography locations as organizational tools. By clicking on From My Point of View folder, you'll find themed galleries that are loosely organized by kinds of birds. I chose not to use ornithological groupings. Rather, I grouped birds informally from a personal perspective.
By clicking on Location, Location, Location, you'll find birds organized by place. It's pretty obvious, but the one that holds the most potential for confusion is the broad category called Arizona Deserts, Fields, Oases. There are some birds that truly make the desert their home come what may. Others tend to be more seasonal and gravitate to water, whether in fields, along rivers or ponds. They may spend part of their time in the desert and part of their time in the mountains or elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere. For instance, one day last spring I looked out my office window and saw a Spotted Towhee in my yard. I live in the desert but my pictures of these birds were taken in what I call Arizona High Country.
You'll find a few duplicate photos in different galleries,. You also may have to look into two or three galleries to find all the pictures of a given bird. For instance, some of my Great Gray Owl pictures are in the owls gallery, but more of them are in the Sax-Zim Bog location gallery. Sax-Zim Bog in northern Minnesota is where I photographed the owls.
The Featured Photos sits apart as a gallery of 30 or so of my favorite bird pictures. I do plan to change out some of the photos every month to keep this gallery fresh.
One final note. If you look closely at the photos on the website, you are going to see a "Wings and Wonder" watermark. That's to prevent image theft via computer. If you decide to buy a print or other product that uses one of my photos, there will be no watermark on the images.
I hope you enjoy my bird pictures. Please let me know what you think.
~ Jim Ripley