Category: Birds

The Other Side of the Fence

Although I do like walking Nisqually Refuge just for the walk, the main reason I walk there, particularly with the gas prices so high, is to see new birds.

Judging from this week, though, it might be best to just stay home if I’m mainly interested in bird pictures. When I stepped out on the front porch yesterday afternoon, a rather large shape scurrying away from the deck startled me. Luckily I had my camera with me or I would have missed this shot

of a Ring-necked Pheasant who apparently had dropped in for an unannounced visit, even though he was somewhat camera shy.

Today’s visitor wasn’t nearly as shy. This Black-Headed Grosbeak landed on the roof right outside my second story den window to announce her arrival. She was even polite enough to stick around the bird feeder long enough that I could get several good shots:

I missed shots of several other visitors today because I didn’t have my camera handy, but still enjoyed close encounters with the local Merlin Falcon and the Flicker while walking in the park.

I continue to be amazed by the number of birds I’ve seen recently and wonder if they’ve always been there and I’ve just been too preoccupied with making money to notice them or if there is some hidden force making them appear as I’m ready to see them.

Great Egret, Too

It’s hard to resist the temptation to play around with the egret images, even though they were natural abstractions as taken. This one is presented exactly as it came out of the camera, with added frame and words:

I wonder if words add another dimension to the image, just the way the framing seems to change the context of the picture.

And here’s a more traditional picture of the same great egret, the first ones I captured on a rather drab, grey morning:

Although it’s certainly more â€?”realistic,â€? it seems to me to convey an entirely different impression of the egret.

A Great Egret

Photographically speaking, today’s visit to Nisqually Refuge was a rather tough day. First, I couldn’t get my camera set up fast enough to get a picture of a little woodpecker that I encountered within a hundred yards of beginning the walk. Even though I saw him later, I never got nearly as close as I did at the beginning of the walk.

As it turned out, I saw fewer birds today than I saw on any of my previous five visits. There just plain didn’t seem to be many birds out today. I suspect that we’re between seasons, where the summer birds have largely disappeared and migrating birds haven’t quite shown up.

The only unusual bird I saw today was a great egret, a bird I’d originally seen three weeks ago but didn’t have much luck shooting because it was so dark and cloudy. It was bright and clear today, but I didn’t have much better luck than before although I wasn’t more than ten feet away from him for nearly a half hour.

The problem was that he was sitting preening himself on the other side of a rather dense tree, and, although he didn’t seem to mind my taking pictures of him, he certainly wasn’t going to make taking them easy. Despite my best efforts, I could never get a clear shot of him and couldn’t get far enough away to fit him into a single shot.

So what I ended up with was two rather interesting shots that have been stitched together from three or four different shots. Strangely enough, I’m rather fond of both of them, and decided that I really didn’t need to do anything to enhance either picture.

As you can tell, this is clearly not a “realistic” shot, but I haven’t manipulated the images at all in Photoshop, as I often do. The bands of light were produced by varying branches and leaves between me and the egret, not by stitching the pictures together because any flaws of that nature would show up as straight horizontal lines, not bands of various shades and colors.

I did get a few close-ups that would probably be considered “realistic,” but I prefer these two shots.

They somehow capture the intimate feeling that I got from watching the egret groom itself the half hour I was there. There’s almost a voyeuristic overtone to the photographs that also somehow seems appropriate.

Of course, perhaps I just appreciate the fact that they appear rather artistic without my having to do a single thing to them in Photoshop.

Pileated Woodpecker

After yesterday’s shots at Nisqually Refuge I was upset enough with my new 1.4 extender that I took it off the 400 mm lens I used for birding yesterday. Today I discovered the real reason a number of my shots were so blurry. It’s been dark enough around here that the 5.6 lens has to use an extremely low shutter speed, less than a 1/60 of a second in most cases. Turns out its nearly impossible even with a monopod, at least for me, to hold a 400 mm telephoto lens entirely still. Thus, blur. and more blur. If the bird happens to move while you’re photographing the problem obviously gets worse.

It’s been cloudy and dark here all week, but I still decided to go to Pt. Defiance Park and try to get some bird pictures, either Blue Jays or Pileated Woodpeckers.

After nearly two hours of nary a bird song, I was about to turn back when I spotted a Pileated Woodpecker right in front of me. It flew away and I was about to move on to see if I could find it again, when pieces of wood came flying down from a nearby tree. Obviously the woodpecker’s mate or offspring was busy finding bugs. Unfortunately, it was in extremely deep foliage. When I checked out the pictures in the LCD display, they were so blurry as to be nearly unrecognizable.

There simply wasn’t enough light to get a decent picture. Frustrated, I headed down the trail, only to run into the mate again, this time in a relatively “open” area, though that’s a misnomer in the middle of an old-growth fir forest. I could see him “plain as day” using the magical instrument that are my eyes, but I set the camera to over and under expose and shot on both auto focus and manual focus. I shot as long as the woodpecker would endure the constant beeping of the camera.

Again, most of the shots were so dark or so blurry that they were nearly unrecognizable. Here’s one of the best, tweaked in Photoshop to make it pass muster.

I’m afraid that’s the best picture I’m going to get unless we get some really bright days. I checked what a “faster” 400mm telephoto lens would cost but decided that at a asking price of $14,000 I really didn’t need to check to see what Amazon’s discounted price was. I think I’d rather feed a village in Africa for a year than capture a picture of a PileatedWoodpecker in the middle of an old-growth forest.