My Top 25 favorite photos of 2024

As 2024 came to a close, so did the second year of my birding obsession, er, adventure.

This whole birding thing started for me on New Year’s Day 2023 when my wife I visited the Orlando Wetlands to check out the new Cypress Boardwalk. I decided to bring a camera along just for the heck of it.

As luck (or as my wife might prefer to say, curse) would have it, the weather was fantastic and the park was full of so many different birds. I took a lot of photos and was immediately hooked. I started making regular visits there and elsewhere with my camera.

As fun as that first year of birding was, the second one was even better. In addition to my regular places, I was also able to do some birding during trips to the Netherlands, Scotland, England and the Bahamas as well as Nevada, Arizona and even the Florida Keys.

My first year I photographed 160 different species birds. In 2024, I added 76 new ones to my bird catalog.

So many birds, and so many photos.

Out of the thousands of pictures I took during the year, I narrowed them down to my Top 25 favorite photos of 2024, plus some honorable mentions.

They’re listed in chronological order.

My Top 25 for 2024

My Honorable Mentions

While it did not make my Top 25 list, I have to recognize my picture of an Indigo Bunting at Orlando Wetlands. It won an honorable mention in the Orange Audubon Society’s annual photo contest and has been featured in one of their brochures and newsletters.

After I wrote this post and picked the top 25 photos days ago, I ended up seeing and photographing an endangered Whooping Crane in Osceola County on New Year’s Eve. I had to include that here, too.