This is a contribution to Jez Braithwaite’s Fan Of… #55 and a ramble about a lens I have been using for 24 years.
I brought the Olympus OM Zuiko 350mm f/2.8 used in 1996 and over the past 24 years it has been used to photograph a wide variety of subjects. The idea for this post came from exchanging comments with Jez after my recent Fan Of… Olympus Cameras post.
Having owned the lens for so long I have thousands of photos taken with it and I was having a very hard time selecting just five or six for this post. So this will be part one of two, this post will cover bird and wildlife images while the second post will cover everything else.

The 350mm lens on my home made ground pod. The ground pod dates back to the early 1990s.

An Osprey with a White Sucker on the Lake Huron shoreline in Southampton, Ontario in 2008.

An American Red Squirrel in dappled sunlight on the South Bruce Peninsula, Ontario in 2018.

American White Pelicans on a channel where a marsh drains into a section of the Last Mountain Lake National Wildlife Area, Saskatchewan in 1999. I was sitting in the water with the lens on a tripod in the water with me.

A Eurasian Wren singing in the spring of 1997 at a reservoir in south Cheshire, England.

A juvenile Ruby-throated Hummingbird in flight on the South Bruce Peninsula, Ontario in 2018.

A Richardson’s Ground Squirrel looking for something to eat having just emerged from hibernation in the spring of 1998. Taken close to the town of Punnichy, Saskatchewan, Canada.