Can YOU Help?
Evening Love Cranking Up
Spring has sprung on the property and Sharon’s favorite birds have come back. We have two distinct populations of Evening Grosbeaks, winter and summer. This migratory species ranges over most of North America and Mexico with our winter Grosbeaks coming south from Canada, stopping at our feeders and our summer Grosbeaks coming up from the south to stop at our feeders. Sharon carefully notes their comings and goings over the years and so looks forward to the summer population since they are so active and noisy!
We were in our home for years before we first saw the Evening Grosbeak on the property. We’d seen them in the Sierra but not around our feeders. Then eighteen years ago the first one arrived in May. Couldn’t move one foot in the house without flushing them. They are incredibly shy! Then none over the winter until the following May when we had a couple of Grosbeaks. The summer population slowly grew overs the years and then about seven years ago, the winter population showed up. This past winter, we had a continual flock of about thirty Grosbeaks and this summer, well we can’t count all the Grosbeaks in all the feeders. It’s so much fun to see all the yellow in the trees and darting around the property. That’s a long winded story about the photos you see here taken yesterday.
Last year we saw the Grosbeaks one day go to the tops of our leafing out aspens and start striping it of its new buds. We were horrified cause we thought we’d soon have bare trees! We were totally confused cause these are seed eating birds. We watched and watched and after a short time, they flew from the aspens which as the summer unfolded had the best growth ever. Still don’t understand what’s going on there, interesting biology. Well this morning, we saw the Grosbeaks leave the feeders and head up into the apsens so I grabbed the camera to photograph the action.
What you see here are the males who are watching the females (spring love) and the females who are eating the leaf buds. It was a good day to photograph this biology as we had a good cloud cover – soft, saturated light. The best part was when I stepped out on the deck to shoot. As I stood there, the other Evening Grosbeaks kept coming into the seed feeder five feet in front of me and the bird bath one foot from me as if I didn’t exist. Such a change from decades ago and it’s such fun! It’s one of the greatest benefits of having a shooting gallery in your own backyard (want to get started, here’s a class on backyard bird photography). You can see and photograph so easily all that great biology with ease. I enjoy it this time of year especially as the Evening love cranks up!
Simple Pleasures – Score!
On my last two week bird road trip, I photographed 42 species of birds, 23 were new to my files. It was a great trip! Now I saw some gorgeous birds, some rare birds, some weird birds and lots of birds but the one that was the real joy to photograph was this Bobolink. Why? I’ve been seeing Bobolinks on wires for two decades. I have many times stalked a Bobolink, had them in the viewfinder but for every possible reason, I had never got one click of one. Not a rare bird, not an incredibly cool looking bird but for me, one of those birds I’ve always wanted only because of the challenge of getting the shot. And this trip I got one in the viewfinder, I lucked out with a clean background and nice light (not great light though) and made the click. What’s the point? No matter where you are in your wildlife photography, having a critter in your sites, preferably a “common” one that you want that nice photo of drives you to get out and get that photograph. You might not get the shot of the bird you’re after, but you will photograph birds and therefore hone your skills. It’s a fun thing to do, a great challenge, a simple pleasure especially when you score!
Update – the chase is still on! This is a Lark Bunting and not a Bobolink. Hot dogs!
Just A Sliver
When the heavens put on a show, it’s one of the great events that can disappear as fast as it appears. Bringing that fleeting moment of majesty to life is the challenge because of in large part of its scale. When the tops of those clouds are 30,000′ or higher, how do you say “freakin huge” in the small medium of our camera? And if you have a storm as part of that story, bringing that power of nature to life just adds to the mix of complexity. There are lots and lots of ways to start to communicate this starting at the bottom and working your way to the top!
Black Hills, SD
captured D5, 70-200f4VR
You gotta have some scale in the photo, something that permits the eye to quickly saw, “dang, that’s big!” Photographers understand this but tend to put too much landscape in the bottom of the frame. At the same time, often the landscape is not as interesting as the heavens themselves. The sliver is even more important in these cases so it doesn’t detract from the majesty above. Now the top photo, the landscape sliver was too evenly lit so I added “topography” as I show in my class. So when those heavens open up and take your stare up, bringing it all into the viewfinder and give the eye an anchor with just a sliver.
Song of Spring
I’m up at Magee Marsh, OH and even with 55 degree temps and the sky spitting at me, the sound of spring is everywhere! Jake had come up here a couple of years back and said, “Dad, you gotta go” and so I’m here. He was so right! Had a marvelous day in this new Shang-ra-la seeing some gorgeous birds sing the blessings of spring. What a day!
What species did I see? Lost track to be honest with you. Spent a heck of a lot of time with Yellow Warblers (top photo) cause even though common in my backyard, these are wearing their spring best and singing up a storm and point blank range. I had really good birds as well like this Prothonotary Warbler which stuck around for quite a while. With these small subjects and travel being restricted to a boardwalk, I went out with the big gun, D5 / 800mm. With the over saturated light, shot with no flash, at zero exposure comp. Only out the ordinary thing I did was raise the ISO to 400. What a great experience … loved it!
Caverns of Sonora
click to see large pano
One of the great aspects of storm chasing is seeing parts of our amazing country you otherwise wouldn’t see. The Caverns of Sonora is a great example of what I mean. It is the coolest cavern I’ve toured but didn’t know it even existed! The sad thing is that now I know about it, I probably wouldn’t travel just to see it but on a road trip, it’s a must do stop! There are tons of great treasures like this you see while your storm chasing that make the chase just that much sweeter!
You go down if I remember correctly nearly 200 vertical feet on the tour. That’s a lot of stairs cause you gotta come back up them to get out. At first, the cavern isn’t all that impressive and then all of a sudden you turn a corner and the magic appears, room after room after room! The natural beauty, the sculptures created by water and minerals is staggering! The lighting is provided by the lights for the trail which is done pretty well for our purposes (I shot in AWB the whole time) The one challenge in photographing the caverns is providing a sense of scale. You can’t touch nothin nor put anything in the frame like a coin to give you any sense of scale. I went down with just the D5 / 14-24AFS and shot the whole time at ISO 3200 and either f/2.8 or f/4. The top pano was the best way I could think of to give you a sense of scale as each individual photo of the pano was taken at 24mm so when you add that all three up, you get a sense of the physical size of this one room in the caverns. So two lessons come from this, the first is, this country has treasures everywhere and the second lesson, we need to take the time to smell the roses to treasure them all!