Tag Archives: birds

A Simple Wildlife Photography Setup

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What I’ve found useful.

Juvenile Robin
Juvenile Robin captured at f/5.6, 1/30 second, ISO 400 with 300mm lens.

Let me start again with this disclaimer: I am not a professional photographer. I am a relatively serious amateur who happens to have a bit of extra cash now and then to invest in decent quality — but not professional grade — camera equipment.

Yet I made all three of the bird photos in this blog post and a bunch of others I’m pretty proud of.

I believe in simplicity when doing photography. I don’t like to carry around a lot of stuff. I feel that the more crap you carry around and have to juggle to get the shot, the less likely you are to capture the fleeting images that we see — and miss — every day. And there’s nothing more fleeting than wildlife, especially birds and insects.

After yesterday’s impromptu shoot from my camper — when I went outside barefoot in an attempt to photograph a killdeer mother and her three chicks — I realized that there are only three pieces of equipment a serious amateur wildlife photographer needs:

  • Nikon D80

    A decent quality digital SLR. Mine is a Nikon D80. It’s two years old and it does what I need it to do. My husband just got a D90 and it looks like another good option. Some folks like Canon equipment. That’s supposed to be very good, too. (My favorite point-and-shoots were always tiny Canon PowerShots — but they’re really not appropriate for serious photography.) The important thing is that it offers all the features of an SLR camera, including various modes so you can shoot with aperture or shutter speed priority, with manual settings, or using the camera’s built-in programming. And, of course, it needs to support interchangeable lenses.

  • Nikon 70-300mm Zoom Lens

    A good fixed focal length or zoom telephoto lens. I’m talking 300mm or better here. I have a Nikkor 70-300mm f4.5/5.6 ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom Lens. This is not a cheap lens; don’t get suckered in to buying the cheaper version of this — or any other lens — if you can afford the better lens. AF stands for autofocus, which I actually need, as my vision deteriorates. VR stands for vibration reduction. There’s some kind of a motor inside the lens that kicks in to steady the image when needed — usually when I zoom in to 300mm. If you’re an old film photographer, keep in mind that most digital cameras, for reasons I’m not 100% clear on, have different focal length equivalents from your old film camera. On my Nikon, it’s a 1.5 ratio. That means a 300mm lens on my Nikon D80 is equivalent to a 450mm lens on my old Nikon 6006. That’s a lot of magnification.

  • Manfrotto Monopod

    A good quality monopod. Yes, a tripod would be steadier, but I simply cannot capture those fleeting moments when I’m fiddling with a tripod head to get my camera set up right. I know because I tried my tripod first yesterday. I got fed up within 60 seconds and switched to the monopod. My monopod is a Manfrotto 679B with three sections. It has a foam grip and rubber foot and makes an excellent walking stick for hiking. I bought it over a year ago and didn’t use it for six months. I tried using it with video and it wasn’t steady enough for me. But it’s perfect for still photos using that big zoom lens.

Now put the lens on the camera and the camera on the monopod. Resist the urge to take along any other lenses or equipment. Go to a place where you know there will be wildlife. Extend the leg of your monopod so the camera is about level with your face. Be quiet. Wait. When the wildlife comes, point and shoot.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know I’m living in a trailer parked in the small RV park at a golf course. Every night they water the lawn between the sites. Every morning and evening the birds come out to pick in the grass for worms and other goodies.

There’s a family of killdeer that absolutely taunts me. I see them from my window every day: a mom and three chicks. The chicks are adorable; miniature versions of the mom. I’ve been trying to photograph them for days, but they’re extremely skittish and run off across the parking lot as soon as they see me.

Juvenile Robin

Juvenile Robin, captured at f/5.6, 1/60 second, ISO 400 with a 300mm lens.

I tried again yesterday. When they ran off, I set my sights (and lens) on a number of baby robins. The photos in this blog post are the result. I used the equipment listed here. The camera was set to program mode. No flash (of course).

I shot 79 photos in the span of about 30 minutes. I never ventured farther away from my camper than 150 feet. I couldn’t; I was barefoot! (Next time I’ll remember to throw on a pair of shoes.) I was shooting two juvenile robins at the base of a tree when they suddenly flew up into the tree. They perched on low branches well within reach of my lens. I got many good shots of them but I think these are among the best. The other shot was taken a bit later when a mother bird came to drink and bathe at a puddle near her “baby.”

First Bath

Mother robin showing her baby how to bathe, captured at f/5.6, 1/400 second, ISO 400 with a 300mm lens.

The two bird close-ups are full-frame photos — not cropped at all. The photo of the mom and her baby is cropped; I discovered that when you get too close to a robin and her young, the robin will fly off, leaving the baby behind. So I kept my distance for this shot to include both of them.

Anyway, the point of all this is to remind photographers that they don’t need a lot of fancy equipment to get good wildlife photos. What’s more important is having quality equipment, some kind of steadying platform for the camera, and patience. Go where the wildlife will be. Wait. If you can get into a kind of hidden position, great.

I’m sure I’ll be repeating this exercise again soon. I still need to capture those elusive killdeer.

Sometimes It’s Too Easy to Get a Good Shot

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Maybe I shouldn’t try so hard.

The other afternoon, I drove down to Quincy Lakes with my Nikon D80 camera, 70-300 mm VR lens, and monopod. It was a scouting expedition for me. I’d spent a lot of time down at Quincy Lakes in the summer of 2008, photographing birds. This was my first visit in 2009. Although I brought my camera along, I wasn’t really expecting to take many photos. I was more interested in finding “good spots” to set up a tripod for some serious photography.

Of course, once I got down there and saw the incredible variety of colorful birds, I couldn’t stop myself from shooting away. I’d park the truck and hike a bit of a distance away from it, plant the foot of my monopod in the dirt, and target a bird. Most of the red-winged blackbirds and yellow-headed blackbirds I saw, however, were clinging to tall reeds, with other tall reeds blocking my view. I shot a lot of photos, but knew that only a small percentage of them would be any good. I wasn’t sure how I’d be able to do any better with a tripod.

After about 90 minutes and eight or so stops and short hikes, I was tired and ready to go back and review what I’d shot. But I detoured down a road to check out the camping area. If Mike comes up to Washington to join me later in the season, we might pull the trailer over there for a few days of camping on a lake.

I was just driving away from the parking area when I spotted a yellow-headed blackbird clinging to some reeds on the side of the road. The bird was less than 15 feet away from the roadside. I pulled up abeam him as quietly as I could in a diesel pickup truck and pressed the brake to stop. For a moment, I just looked at the bird and he looked at me. My camera was still attached to my monopod; its leg was almost fully extended. If I opened the door to step out or swung the leg around outside my window, the bird would surely fly off. In fact, I couldn’t understand why he hadn’t already flown off.

Yellow-Headed Blackbird

Yes, I shot this photo from the window of my truck.

With my foot still on the brake and the truck stopped squarely in the middle of the narrow dirt road, I reached over and began to unscrew the camera from the monopod’s very basic swivel head. Every once in a while, I’d glance back at the bird. He remained in place. I finally got the camera free, zoomed it to 300 mm, and focused. I squeezed off about a dozen shots before the bird flew off.

This is the best one. It is not cropped.

I don’t know about you, but I find this incredibly ironic. We gear up and go out with multiple lenses and filters and tripods. We hike away from roads and vehicles and people. We bushwhack off trails and wade into streams.

And yet it’s possible to take a photo as nice as this without leaving the vehicle.

Hell, I think I even had the stereo on.

It pays to cruise around with the windows rolled down, I guess.

Alex the Bird at the Office

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Showing off.

I bought Alex the Bird a stand that he can hang out on in my office. The idea was really to take it down to Rear Window (our Phoenix condo) so he can hang out with me when I work there. He really hates it there and I know he’d like it better if he could spend more time with me. But since neither of us spend much time at Rear Window, the stand hasn’t made it down there yet.

Anyway, I realized that with him standing behind me, I could probably get some good photos of him with my computer’s built-in iSight camera. So I took a shot.

Then I realized that I could also make a movie with the camera. So I fired up iMovie and recorded directly from the iSight into an iMovie file. Here’s the result. Alex can talk up a storm when he’s in the mood, but he wasn’t at his best this evening. I’ll try again another time.

Foraging with Alex the Bird

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A down-to-earth video.

So many of my videos are about flying or show off scenes from the air. I thought I’d work on one that was a little closer to earth. This one features my parrot, Alex the Bird, foraging for treats in his cage. I blogged about this particular toy way back in 2006.

The text that follows is the narration you’ll find on the video. The video is at the bottom of this post. This was mostly an experiment to see how I could use the voiceover feature of iMovie ’09. I couldn’t. I wound up recording the narration in Audio Hijack Pro and editing it in Fission, then dragging clips into iMovie. iMovie apparently no longer includes audio editing features. This is unfortunate. I’m trying to figure out why Apple keeps removing features from iMovie as it updates it. (Of course, I can’t complain, given the image stabilization feature is so incredible.)

Anyway, here’s the narration and video. Enjoy.

I’ve put together this little video of Alex foraging for treats. I thought it might be interesting for folks who like birds or are considering buying one. It’s also a video exercise for me, but that’s another story.

In the wild, parrots forage for food. That means they use their claws and beaks to tear apart nuts and berries and pull bark off of trees looking for food. They don’t have their food in ceramic cups like caged parrots do. Foraging is an instinct. It also keeps the birds pretty busy all day so they don’t have time to be bored.

Alex has never lived in the wild, but he still has foraging instincts. And I like to keep him busy so he doesn’t get bored and engage in self-destructive behavior, like feather plucking.

What you see here is a cage-like structure that I bought years ago when I first got Alex. It came with shreddable toys and blocks in it. Alex was only mildly interested in it. But when I replaced those toys with plain old shredded paper surrounding Alex’s favorite treats — edamame or soy bean pods and unsalted cashews — he got very interested. So every few days, I set him up with this hanging toy so he can forage for his favorite foods.

As you watch this video, you might notice a few things.

First, Alex knows the treats are in there and he knows what he needs to do to get at them — pull all the paper out. This looses up the tightly packed cage so he can pull the beans and nuts out and eat them. You’ll see him successfully remove a few beans and nuts in this video. I cut out a lot of the shredding activity. It took Alex about 40 minutes to work through the toy today, and no one is interested in watching him that long.

Also, you’ll see Alex use his feet to steady the swinging toy. Letting the toy swing from the top of the cage makes it tougher for him. Tougher is better. I’ve learned that the goal is to make the foraging task difficult enough that it takes him a long time but not so tough that he gives up.

You may also notice Alex glancing back at the camera. The camera was sitting on a tripod near his cage and he didn’t quite trust it. He keeps looking at it to make sure it’s not sneaking up on him to attack him. Fortunately, he’s more interested in the treats than the camera.

Alex is almost eight years old. He’s expected to live 40 or 50 years. Right now, he’s just finishing up his winter molt, so his feathers don’t look as good as they would in a month or two. He molts every winter and looks pretty ratty for about two to three months.

I hope you enjoyed this visit with Alex. You can stop by my Web site, AnEclecticMind.com, to see more videos from my life.

On Bird Strikes

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Not nearly as rare — or as dangerous — as you think.

Yesterday’s dramatic landing of an Airbus plane in the Hudson River between New York and New Jersey has put the topic of bird strikes on everyone’s mind. As usual, the media is spinning stories about it, apparently to generate the fear that sells newspapers, gets listeners, and keeps viewers glued to the television set.

Pilots — the people who know aviation a lot better than the average news reporter — also know a bit about bird strikes.

Bird Strikes are Not That Rare

The truth of the matter is that bird strikes aren’t nearly as rare as many people think. I can think of five bird strike incidents that touched my life:

  • Years ago, on a Southwest Airlines flight taking off from Burbank, our plane flew through a flock of white birds. It was nighttime and I don’t know what the birds were — seagulls? — but I clearly saw them in the glow of the plane’s lights, flying past the wings as we climbed out. When we landed in Phoenix and I left the plane, I glanced through the open cockpit door and saw the blood on the outside of the windscreen. Bird strike.
  • On my first day of work as a pilot at the Grand Canyon, one of the other pilots had a bird strike during a tour. The bird had passed through the lower cockpit bubble and landed in a bloody heap on the pilot’s lap. He flew back with the bird there and a very distraught front seat passenger beside him. The cockpit bubble needed replacement, of course.
  • While waiting at the Grand Canyon for my charter passengers to complete an air tour with one of the helicopter operators there, the helicopter my passengers was on suffered a bird strike. The pilot calmly reported it as she flew in. When she landed, there was bird guts and blood at the top center of the helicopter’s bubble. She’d been lucky. The helicopter, an EC130, has a central intake for the turbine engine and the bird hadn’t been sucked in.
  • On my very first rides gig with my R44 helicopter, I was taking a group of three passengers for an 8-minute tour around a mountain near Aguila, AZ when I heard a loud clang. Instruments okay, controls felt fine, passengers weren’t reacting. I didn’t know what it was until I landed. That’s when one of my ground crew pointed out the dent in my landing gear’s fairing. My first (and hopefully, only) bird strike had been a non-event for me, but likely a lot more serious for the bird. (Of course, I wasn’t very happy to get a dent on an aircraft only 11 hours old.
  • When a friend of mine took me up in her Decathalon airplane for a little aerobatic demonstration, we hit a bird on takeoff. It went right into the engine at the base of the prop and we instantly smelled cooking bird. My friend climbed enough to circle back and land safefly at the airport. She shut down the engine and climbed out. I watched from the passenger seat as she pulled the remains of a relatively small bird out of the cooling fin area of the engine. After discarding the bird bits, she climbed back in, started up, and we took off again.

That’s five examples of bird strikes I had firsthand knowledge of. In three of those instances, I was on board an aircraft that struck one or more birds. So when people seem amazed that an airliner hit a bird or two, I’m not amazed at all.

According to Wikipedia’s Bird Strike entry:

The first reported bird strike was by Orville Wright in 1905, and according to their diaries Orville “…flew 4,751 meters in 4 minutes 45 seconds, four complete circles. Twice passed over fence into Beard’s cornfield. Chased flock of birds for two rounds and killed one which fell on top of the upper surface and after a time fell off when swinging a sharp curve.”

I’d venture to guess that it happens to at least one airliner every single day.

Bird Strikes Rarely Cause Crashes

The media would like you to think that bird strikes cause crashes. They can, of course — yesterday’s Airbus ditching proved that. They can even cause fiery crashes with deaths. The media wants you to be afraid — very afraid.

But as my above-listed examples also prove, bird strikes can be non-events, often without causing any damage at all to the aircraft.

So what’s an air traveler to do? Worry that his next flight might end with a swim in an icy river or a fireball death? Or stop worrying about it?

What do you think?

On a more personal note: I’m glad the pilot of US Airways Flight 1549 didn’t attempt a landing at Teterboro. My sister lives in an apartment building on the approach end of one of the runways there. A crash there wouldn’t have had a happy ending.