Good Experience with Canon

People often focus on their bad experiences with businesses, so it becomes easy to forget that sometimes there are good people who honestly give a poop about your satisfaction. This is one of those stories.

Just before Christmas, I ordered a 600mm prime lens from Canon through our educational sales rep. He assured me there was stock when I placed the order and that I should receive the lens during the week between Christmas and New Year's.

As it turns out, they did not have stock. The Canon sales rep felt pretty badly about this, so he arranged for a loaner to be sent to me overnight from Vancouver while we waited for more stock, all at their cost. This was an incredibly good gesture! It gave me confidence that they actually care about their customers, at least for high-end equipment.

Having the loaner has given me time to learn how to use the lens to its best capabilities, so when the new one arrives this week, I'll hit the ground running. Not literally of course. Hitting the ground with this lens would be a bad thing, and running with it would be impossible even if I tried!

In the meantime, I'm hoping to get out to see a flock of Snow Buntings reported close by. There'll be Horned Larks as well. Last year, we had Common Redpolls in the same area, but as Ron Pittaway's Winter Finch Forecast for 2019-20 predicts, there won't be any of those this far south this winter. If I have the time and energy, I might also go looking for a Golden Eagle reported up by Glen Morris. These reports are all available on eBird, an amazingly rich citizen-science bird reporting database developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology at Cornell University. Someday, I'll write more about eBird and its impact on birding and bird knowledge.

Today's photo is one of a Bufflehead I recently took with the loaner lens from Canon. It could be a little sharper around the eye, but I really like the duck's position and the camera's point-of-view.

Bufflehead