I'm scrambling to get everything squared away before heading off to the 2013 Colorado Field Ornithologists Convention in beautiful Cortez, Colorado, so I'll let these two pictures do the talking... Bottom line: If you want better snaps at your feeders, give your avian subjects some nice-looking perches to pose on.
Ughh... Beauty and a Beast!
Ace!
I'm easing myself into a new realm of bird photography, dabbling with videos to supplement my core interest of shooting stills. Three primary factors influenced my decision to try this. First, I enviously watched my buddies Brian Sullivan and Chris Wood shooting video with their DSLR rigs and thought it would be fun to try it. Second, I finally upgraded to a DSLR body capable of video (putting my trusty Nikon D300 into a backup role with my new D7100 stepping into its place.) Finally, I've seen the power of video to tell stories though experiences like my PolarTREC expedition and I know the attentive way my middle school students engage in topics with short movie clips. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how about a movie??
Anyway, I'm still figuring this game out but I'd like to share three short bird videos I've made this spring and a lesson or two I learned from each. I hope experienced bird videographers will leave their best tips in the comments to help get me and anyone over the learning curve faster!
Case 1: Wilson's Snipe, Weld County, Colorado, 1 April 2013.
Scenario: First serious bird video I attempted. I was shooting from my car along a roadside ditch with the feeding snipe (& nearby vocalizing male.)
Lessons learned:
Case 2: Short-eared Owl, Boulder County, Colorado, 16 April 2013.
Scenario: After a significant spring blizzard there was an amazing fallout of longspurs along the plowed edges of eastern Boulder County rural roads. When swapping notes with some buddies about what we'd seen I got wind of a Short-eared Owl a few roads over. I shot from my vehicle which worked great as a blind- once I stopped and shut down the owl dismissed me after an initial keen look-over. Sparse traffic didn't seem to bother the owl, either, and the drivers didn't even notice the bird as they passed it mere feet away (in fact, I missed it on my first transit, looking out along fencelines instead of roadside where it was sheltering on the leeward side of the roadside ditch.)
Lessons learned:
Case 3: Foraging Bonaparte's & Franklin's Gulls, Weld County, Colorado, 21 April 2013.
Scenario: A midge hatch on a pond attracted a few dozen Bonies along with a Frankie or two. I shot hundreds of stills, trying to capture some of the birds' amazing aerobatics and ability to nab midges without slowing down.
Stills like this are neat but only capture 1/2000 sec. each of a bird's behavior. Amongst my still shooting I tried to keep up with their flights to put a little clip together.
Lessons learned:
I hope that you enjoyed Noah Strycker's latest ABA Blog entry about camera trapping as much as I did. Like Noah, I'm really enjoying the addition of motion-activated trail cameras to my bag of tricks. One of Forrest Gump's trademark quotes may well apply to camera trapping: "Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." Just substitute "checking a trail camera memory card" for "Life" and I think the comparison is apt.
Anyway, in my last ABA Blog installment I mentioned that I was experimenting with a couple of Bushnell TrophyCam HD units, with a primary appeal being their ability to shoot motion-activated infrared movies at night. One is still pointed at my Barn Owl box, and I repositioned the other to face down a log downed by beavers along Boulder Creek in Weld County, Colorado. One issue I've noticed with the TrophyCam is that close subjects get overexposed by the IR illumination, even when it is set to low power. Commentator Mike Patterson responded my post by suggesting I use copy paper as a diffuser, a technique he successfully used to build a virtual pitfall trap. I liked the idea and it worked well in a short test but I was worried about the effect of wet weather on the paper over long unsupervised deployments. Following the similar advice of the Camera Trap Codger I tried a homemade IR diffuser made of a thin sheet of closed-cell packing foam, which I taped to the inside of the metal security housing in front of the IR array. I like the results- the bright levels I experienced center frame in earlier trials seem toned down and didn't require post-production adjustments to moderate the exposure.
I was expecting mainly mammals at this set, particularly the beavers that chewed the tree down, but in a week of camera trapping I had many birds join the mix. I edited some highlights of the week into the video below to show the surprising diversity of mammals and birds that triggered the camera.
This time I have a challenge for my faithful readers. In the comments section, list the bird & mammal species as they appear in the video (heard-only detections count, too!) I know the audio isn't the greatest, but it does add an interesting aspect to each clip and I know you'll recognize several species making noise. The first person to list them correctly will win a copy of Brian Kimberling's new novel, Snapper. There is a birding theme in the story- here's the publisher's synopsis:
A disastrous love affair between a man and a place, Snapper relates the brief career of a professional bird researcher in Southern Indiana. While conducting surveys and censuses of the same songbirds John James Aubudon painted in Indiana two hundred years ago – now in catastrophic decline – Nathan Lochmueller traverses a deeply dysfunctional society. He encounters an enormous concrete Santa Claus statue at a remote highway diner, white supremacists, the nation’s oldest Dial-A-Prayer service, Vietnam vets, and a discarded human thigh bone. And, of course, a woman who won’t stay true and a pick-up truck that won’t run.
Both a short story cycle, and a fully-formed novel, Snapper is a lyrical portrait of a rural wilderness and its very dark, very human, heart.
So good luck to any challengers for the prize! Remember to list all of the mammals and birds in the movie including heard-only detections- first correct list in the comments gets the book. Even if you don't want to play along, I hope you enjoy the little vignettes of streamside life captured by the trail cam (you might want to embiggen it by clicking the full screen icon in the lower left of the video frame.)
It is nice to see a pair of Barn Owls back for another season using a box I put up a few years ago in a friend's barn not too far from home. I featured these barn owls in an earlier post, with still Infrared (IR) photos taken with a Reconyx Hyperfire HC500 trail camera. I still really like that camera but wanted to try IR video, so over the winter I got a pair of Bushnell TrophyCam HD trail cameras, which can get non-disruptive video and sound recordings in addition to still photos. So far I'm pretty happy with the results, and I'm excited to keep the video trail cam experimentation going through this spring. My quick impressions of the TrophyCam HD vs. the HC500 so far:
Pros:
Cons:
Anyway, here's a test video put together from the owly barn:
And here's a bonus video using the Bushnell TrophyCam HD, shot near the barn next to Boulder Creek. This one's mainly a mammal feature (watch for 5 different furry species) but there's at least one heard-only bird species to keep in pace with the theme of this blog...
If you follow many bird blogs you may have noticed a lot of press recently for the upcoming Crossley ID
guide to Raptors (scheduled for release in April- your order from Buteo Books helps support the ABA!) Crossley Books and Princeton University Press have coordinated a bird blog tour to introduce the book and I'm very pleased to be a part of it.
Unless you've been living in a cave for the last few years you are no doubt familiar with the revolutionary approach to field guides taken by Richard Crossley. His idea of using digital photographic montages, representing the many aspects of birds we see in the field in a single plate filled with imagery of subjects near and far, perched and in flight, from above and from below, etc. was a refreshingly unique idea first seen in his ID Guide to Eastern Birds. Here Richard has collaborated with raptor gurus Jerry Liguouri and Brian Sullivan to take the concept a bit further. Yes, the trademark composited assemblages are still at the heart of the book but much more text has been added in the back in the form of detailed species accounts and fine-resolution distribution maps. The book also includes several "quiz" plates, featuring multiple looks at raptors in different circumstances often encountered by enthusiasts and photographers in the field. These include themes such as Prairie Raptors, Buteos of the Midwest Prairie, Soaring Widespread Common Raptors, Hovering Raptors, Raptor Topsides, Southeastern Raptors, Raptors of the South, Raptors Going Away, Raptors in Black & White (to emphasize structure and simulate bad lighting conditions), Sunrise on the East Coast (raptors washed in warm light), and Into the Sun (backlit raptors.) These plates have numbered birds without ID labels, with discussion points and the answers given in the back. In short, the book represents a master course on raptor ID and should be in the arsenal of any serious birder in the US, especially those with a fondness for birds of prey. Copies at hawk watches are bound to be dog-eared and broken-spined through loving use by the end of the season, as it offers fantastic comparison photos of any given species of any age or color morph from about any angle and in many types of lighting (just like one encounters in the field!)
So my role in this blog tour is to connect bird photography and the book. What I'll say here is that the guide (along with Crossley's ID Guide to Eastern Birds and upcoming UK and Western editions) show that bird pics can be useful even if they are distant, taken in tough light, etc. I know there is debate about teaching new birders traditional field skills and critical observation techniques vs. just snapping away at everything and figuring out what's on the card later. I appreciate the tension between these extremes but I honestly think that the two approaches aren't mutually exclusive. I know that I have personally learned a lot by anaylizing the myriad of bird photos I've taken just as the countless thousands of hours of keenly listening to birds and staring through my bins and scope have improved my ID skills. When the opportunity presents itself my advice is take pics and look critically at birds, then compare notes when you get home of what you thought you saw vs. what you find in your pics. When it comes to raptors, there is often time to both hoist bins and snap a few pics of a circling bird. Even if it is just a private guess to yourself, stick a name on the bird in the field and then at home see what the pics indicate and note anything you may have missed on the live bird.
Anyway, as a wrap-up event for the blog tour, Richard Crossley and Brian Sullivan will host a live online Raptor ID Happy Hour from 6 to 7pm EDT. Click on over to this Shindig link to RSVP! There's also a generous sweepstakes with some sweet prizes on offer- link here to enter (& make sure to do so by Friday when the contest ends...)
An example of a species account in the new Crossley ID Guide to Raptors (in this case Zone-tailed Hawk.)
Plates like this show many ages and angles of a given species (care to take a stab at identifying this one?)
Other plates show collections of many species to practice ID skills on, like this example of backlit birds of prey.
I hope I'm mostly preaching to the choir when I say that counting birds whenever possible (vs. just ticking species) is important for many reasons. The folks at team eBird have summarized the importance of doing so and some basics to try when counting flocks in their excellent post, "Bird Counting 101". For those facing more advanced counting situations they followed up with "Bird Counting 201". Here I'd like to show one of my favorite ways to count big flocks of birds using digital photographs.
Bird photography is very useful beyond aesthetic reasons. For example, when documenting a rare bird or for use in identifying challenging species a few photos can be invaluable. I have also found that flock shots (however janky) are great for counting bird numbers from the leisure of my laptop. I know I'm not the first birder who has thought of this (indeed, one main way to census flocks of waterfowl etc. is to study aerial photos), but I'd like to share a few tips I've found to be helpful.
First, a great use for a zoom lens is to pull back to fit the flock into the frame. Sometimes a modest point & shoot camera or smart phone may be even better than a telephoto if you are close to a big flock. If you still can't fit the flock in, try to estimate how much of the flock you are getting in the image to use as your basis for multiplying your estimation later. When I'm looking at an image on my computer, I like to use the paintbrush feature in Photoshop Elements (about any image processing software will have similar features), with the pixel radius set to about the body size of each bird. This lets me count individuals by dabbing them each with a spot of virtual paint, eliminating re-counts. I also like to change the color in sets of birds according to the general size of the flock (like every 10, 25, or 100 birds.) This gives me a nice visual of each block of birds and helps me pick up where I left off if I lose count. Not only does this give a really accurate count of the flock but I think it helps me improve my visualization of blocks of birds in the field if I can't get a shot to count later. Here are a few examples of this technique that I've used to get a good count of birds in a flock.
The winter of 2007/2008 produced an amazing irruption of Bohemian Waxwings in Colorado. Here is what I estimated to be about 1/3 of a flock in my Longmont neighborhood on 29 December 2007. How many birds do you think are in this frame?
I arrived at 698 individual birds, each dabbed with a spot of color (in separately colored blocks of 100.) Click on the image to see the color dabs in higher resolution.) Since I thought I was able to fit about 1/3 of the birds in the frame, I estimated the flock to be ~2100 birds.
Here's an example from last fall. On 5 October 2012 an amazing overflight of Sandhill Cranes swept the overcast skies of Boulder. Skein after skein of vocalizing birds traversed the city in the afternoon hours, and amidst my errands I swung into a Safeway parking lot to take a wide-angle shot of one wave.
To count the birds I tweaked up the brightness and contrast and then dabbed the birds in colored groups of 100, arriving at 378 birds. By comparing this group to the multiple other skeins I saw flying by that afternoon I estimated my observation total at 2400 Sandhill Cranes. Adding photos like this along with field notes to eBird checklists is a great way to make your friendly neighborhood eBird reviewer happy!!
Like much of the United States, Colorado is in the midst of an historic redpoll irruption this winter. On 24 November, 2012, I caught up to a large flock that had been reported frequenting Baseline Reservoir in Boulder. When the flock picked up and whirled around I grabbed a shot with every bird in the frame. Care to estimate the count before scrolling down??
In this frame I came up with 60 birds, here dabbed in color blocks of 10. On a personal note, at the time I saw it, this flock was about triple the size of all of my prior cumulative redpolls in the state (a number that has since skyrocketed from several more large flocks I've encountered this winter.)
You don't even need a telephoto rig to try this technique- here's another Bohemian Waxwing flock (from Niwot, Colorado 22 Feb 2013) digibinned with my iPhone through the beta bins that I keep in my car. I propped the binocular on my window (partially rolled up to achieve a good height) and clicked a few shots for a private census.
This time spotting by 20s I came up with 160 birds in the cottonwood tree.
OK, ready for your homework? See what you come up with on this one... ◔_◔
Today's installment is a quick check to see if your windows are ready for special visitors. In this case I'm not talking about the serious issue of bird strikes (but if you are having problems with this please review these excellent strike-prevention posts by Julie Zickefoose and David Sibley.) Instead, I'm talking about how to be ready when neat birds show up outside your windows, either to visit feeders, water, or habitat near your abode.
Some steps are probably obvious, but nonetheless here's what I do during the winter feeding season.
1) Remove window screens. Viewing and especially photographing birds through screenless windows is ideal. Shooting through the glass this way is good, and opening the window, even if only wide enough for the camera lens, is ideal.
2) Wash your windows. It is amazing how grimy the outside of my windows get, and my sliding glass door gets really smudged from kid height down. Clean glass = better viewing & photography.
3) If there is a bird that you really want to photograph, start by shooting through the glass. If the bird sticks around you can always try to open the window later. If you flush the bird away by opening a window you should then build a time machine, go back in time prior to your unfortunate window-opening decision, and photograph the bird through the glass first before attempting to open the window.
4) If you have the opportunity, turn off the indoor lights to cut glare from the inside of the glass. You will also then be hidden in what amounts to an apartment/condo/home-sized photo blind.
5) If the bird's position and your indoor arrangements permit, shoot with your lens close to the glass (or even touching your shade hood to the window), as perpendicular to the glass surface as possible.
6) If it is really cold out and you open your window, warm indoor air escaping can cause image-blurring heat distortion. If you are in a small room such as a bedroom, close the door to reduce airflow. Otherwise, time your shots and/or shoot many pictures to try to get some sharp images amongst the blurry ones.
Here are some of my favorite shots taken from inside my house.
Male American Goldfinch, photographed out my sliding glass door. Water brings in lots of great birds- here I opened the door and sat on the living room floor to photograph birds hitting my Bird Spa.
Once I caught a glimpse of some strange movement out in my dripper bath and noted this American Kestrel having a splash. This time I photographed the small falcon through the sliding door glass, not wanting to scare away the bird.
In April of 2005 hundreds of Bohemian Waxwings choked the trees in my back yard, waiting for a turn at my water features. Here we see some shoulder-to-shoulder waxwing drinking along the rail on my back porch, shot through my kitchen window.
This past January, an immature Northern Shrike made an appearance (and apparently had a meal to judge by the blood on its breast feathers) in my back yard. It flew up to the ornamental cherry tree that shades the back porch, sitting up high and only offering belly views from the first floor. But much to my delight, the view out of the second-floor office window was eye-to-eye. After snapping a few images through the glass I quietly eased the window open enough for my lens to get unobstructed views in the cherry tree. When the shrike flew over to a nearby cottonwood I opened the window all the way and carefully leaned out a little to shoot again from the elevated position.
In December our yard was blessed with a two-day visit by a flock of redpolls. Since this thistle feeder is off to the side of our back porch I leaned out the sliding door just enough for some record shots like this before getting a more serious photo blind setup in place out back.
I think that most readers of this blog are aware of the potential power of digiscoping, but I'd like to illustrate another example of the technique's utility from the Boulder Christmas Bird Count (which I compile) last 16 Dec. In the weeks leading up to the count, a group of Tundra Swans had been seen in the count circle, frequenting a few area lakes. This is a rare species on the count, only recorded 6 times on 70 prior counts. A few of my trusty scouts tried to pin the birds down in the count-week days leading up to the event but dipped- the birds seemed to have moved on. But on the morning of the count I got a text from Bill Kaempfer reporting them on Valmont Reservoir. Nice!!
By mid-afternoon I had finished my territory and had time to swing over to the mighty Valmont to have a gander for myself. While this power plant-heated triple reservoir complex is a winter waterbird haven, the views from public overlooks range from far at best to recedingly distant most of the time. The count territory team had permission to enter the complex for better viewing but I was going to settle for some long scope looks. Still, the swans were great to see in the day's last sloping sunlight, cruising in the windy waters. I put my Panasonic DMC-G5 rig (with a digiscoping-friendly Olympus M.Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 II R Lens) to my Nikon EDG 64mm scope and shot this video:
Notice anything different about one of the birds? Indeed, one of them is sporting a neck collar. Now, in full disclosure, I didn't make this discovery. The neck collared-bird had been well documented in the weeks leading up to the count, and my buddy Christian Nunes had previously submitted the collar number to the USGS Patuxent Bird Banding Lab. Still, it was my first encounter with the banded bird so I thought I'd try to read the collar at this new location and date. Frustratingly, I was having trouble confirming the digits on the distant bird (eye fatigue from a long day's birding and wind shake didn't help either), so I snapped a series of digiscoped stills to see if I could pull out the code.
At this level, I think we can confirm the ID as Tundra Swans through traits such as the variable yellow lores and document the rarity well for our state's Christmas Bird Count reviewer. But I still don't think I can read the neck collar.
By cranking both the scope and camera lens zoom up to nearly maximum levels, cropping the image, and applying some sharpening, the code reveals itself: U856, yellow horizontal numerals on blue (click to enlarge the pic if you can't read the collar.)
While I wasn't the first to crack the bird's code, it was gratifying to confirm that it was the same bird found weeks earlier and to contribute another data point in the bird's known history. The USGS has gotten very streamlined in their responses to band reports, and I was emailed this certificate within a few days of submitting the collar code:
Pretty cool to know the bird was banded as an adult on the marshy flats east of Kotzebue Sound near the Bering Strait in NW Alaksa in the summer of 2010. The banding site is about 2800 straight-line miles away from Valmont Reservoir!
I'm pleased that several manufacturers are producing phone scoping adapters, giving folks a stable option for recording distant birds with their smart phone through their scope. Meopta and Kowa have nice models that work well, and I'll have a detailed review of these coming up in the Feb. issue of Winging It. Their main limitation for now seems to be that they are only made for iPhone 4/4s and only come in adapter diameters matching their scopes and bins (though they will work on other optics if the eyepiece diameter matches closely enough.)
Another outfit, PhoneSkope, has a much more universal solution in their phone scoping adapter. They have many stock smart phone options beyond the iPhone 4/4s (including iPhone 5, Samsung, and Motorola) and will also custom fabricate a phone adapter if it works within their production specification limits. The adapter portion that connects to the scope is also customizable, locking onto to the phone bracket via a bayonet mount.
The PhoneSkope adapter has interchangeable, customizable components- the phone bracket and the eyepiece adapter, which connect by bayonet mount.
The team at PhoneSkope went out of their way to mill me a custom adapter to use with my Nikon EDG scope so I could review the product, but the large diameter of the eyepiece was slightly beyond their machining capabilities. But I've always believed that digiscoping (or in this case, phone scoping) is pretty experimental, so I dug around my garage to see what might work. I found an unused shop vac connector that fit my eyepiece like a glove and decided to go for the mod:
First, I knocked off the needed end of a shop vac adapter with my band saw (a hacksaw would have worked just as well but hey, Power Tools!) Still had all of my fingers when I was finished, which is good...
Next step was to clean up the cut on the belt sander. (Hand sanding would work as well but hey, Power Tools!)
The scavenged tube fits like it was custom-made for the task.
And the adapter tube looks like it will fit well on the phone bracket!
Convinced it would work, I decided to to glue it up. Unfortunately, this took away the great PhoneSkope feature of interchangeable eyepiece adapters but you gotta do what you gotta do. (Epoxy would work well but hey, Super Glue!)
To the field!! The PhoneSkope gives a nice centered image and stable mount. On my zoom eyepiece it starts somewhat vignetted at full camera wide, but by zooming in the phone a bit a full-frame image is obtainable.
Another look at the rig, & what's that bump on the branch?
Hey, it's a distant 2nd-year Bald Eagle brought into iPhone range with my spotting scope and PhoneSkope adapter!
Smart phones shoot video too. My iPhone won't zoom when filming movies so the side vignetting is there, but it isn't too distracting and opens the possibility of capturing behaviors in a way that still photos can't.
A couple of weeks ago, I extolled the virtues of my back yard brush pile. I find myself surveilling the structure nearly every day breakfast, and last week was tickled to see a Red Fox effortlessly hop my 5-foot fence as I enjoyed toast and coffee. It was clearly well-practiced at the ambush, probably hoping for a distracted squirrel, careless bird, or lingering mouse but on this morning the critters at the pile took shelter and the fox moved on after showing off its balancing prowess by strolling along the top of the fence by way of departure. Curious to learn more about what besides birds may be visiting my brush pile, I deployed a motion-activated trail camera to keep 24-hour vigil when I wasn't watching for myself out the kitchen window.
In the short time I've been keeping track, I've found the fox to visit almost every day, at about any time though not yet mid-day. I'll bet it has come away successful at least once and so keeps trying, though I've yet to capture a capture on my trail cam.
Hmmm, why is this squirrel in a hurry to be elsewhere??
Oh, that's why..
The fox knows when the gig is up, though, and breaks off the chase (though no doubt remembers the details to adjust its strategy the next time.)
Maybe a dawn raid?
No good.
Pre-dawn might be good for mice...
Besides the fox, I've seen a few other night visitors. One, though unwelcome, triggered two interesting frames...
One night this fat cat swung by the pile. I've never seen it during the day, but it underscores the benefit of the brush pile as nearby cover for feeding birds. It also forces an errant cat to approach from the open ground in front of the brush pile, denying it the element of surprise. Now what is the cat looking up at on this brisk night?
A second later, the cat is looking nearly straight up. Right under the numerals 3/5 at top center (which means frame 3 of 5 in the sequence), note a gray blur that isn't there in the first frame- click to enlarge both cat pics and you'll see it. I believe this is a wingtip of an owl flushed by the cat and if so, the worst photo I've ever acquired of a strigiform.
Squirrels have the daytime clean-up concession, but at night sometimes a Raccoon will see what spilled seed is left to mop up. Cylindrical baffles like the one visible on the left pole keep both grounded, leaving the feeders to those that can fly in (though I'm sure the fox could jump up if desired.)
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Birders know well that the healthiest, most dynamic choruses contain many different voices. The birding community encompasses a wide variety of interests, talents, and convictions. All are welcome. If you like birding, we want to hear from you.
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