Birds

[Jerry Adams]

I’ve had Bald Eagles apparently following along as I walked on the beach on the Olympics

I think maybe they’re curious about us

[Roger Caffin]

I think maybe they’re curious about us
“He looks pretty exhausted. Wonder if he is going to fall over and die?”

Cheers

[Franco Darioli]

Jokes aside , I have seen several different raptors coming close  for a look and then going back to whatever they were doing before. Recently I had a heron doing the same.

Parrots do that a lot.

[jscott]

curiosity is an aspect of intelligence, I think. I bet parrots do math better than me. goldfish do math better than me.

[Franco Darioli]

The air is a bit cleaner today so I was able to take some decent photos. here are 3 raptors.

The first is a Little Eagle , cought a water bird about 5 minutes after the photo.

The second is kesrel N3. She spotted that  grasshopper from at least 50 metres away. Again she did not mind me beign there, in fact landed on a closer tree to me then the one she started from.

The third is a Brown Falcon I am trying to let me get closer to him . Today I managed about 2-3 metres closer than before.

[Franco Darioli]

another one of the Little Eagle

The only time I have had this bird so close was on a really cold and rainy day. Neither of us was bothered about the other that day.

[Franco Darioli]

Today a local birder posted a photo of a falcon looking up to the sky. his comment was that it was looking at a plane going by.
I had never seen a bird doing that but about two hours later ,as I was taking photos of two lapwings , a plane flew by and both birds lokked up

[David Thomas]

We often have bald eagles watch us as we walk the beach.  They seem to play more attention to the dog and would pay a lot more attention if she weren’t a 70-pound lab.

As a kid, I had an American Kestrel (a.k.a. a sparrow hawk) land on my head.

[Ken Larson]

Check this site out…..

https://www.flickr.com/photos/edpost/albums/72157674982042704

 

[Franco Darioli]

Way better than my photos but I am slowly starting to put more care in taking mine. Still my main point is to walk around and have some fun. Yesterday in two hours I saw 5 different raptors, two getting their prey . Then there were hundreds of birds about , several flocks of different species as well as individuals. I had a good time talking to several people on the way. Some regulars and some new too.

Some more  from yesterday (very overcast)

 

[Franco Darioli]

BTW, to compare bird photography with backpacking, a kit used by keen birders here is the Nikon D850 with the 500mm f/4.

That kit here is about 18k AUD, around 12 K USD. But then you also need other lenses and another body…

(my kit is way less than that)

[Ralph Burgess]

Franco, I got my first real camera last year for when I went to South Africa, I used the Canon EF 100-400 II, much cheaper and more compact than the primes (currently $1,800).   I’m using the new mirrorless “R” bodies, so I won’t be shelling out for a 600mm prime until they make one for the RF mount, I’m sure it’s coming.  There’s a rumour of an RF 100-500 for later this year.

And the tech these days with image stabilization and what-you-see-is-what-you-get in mirrorless cameras makes everything so much easier for beginners.   Some pics from last year in Kruger National Park here:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WtE_hbcFSfjdCuT9kVDyZ8CAJXY06K8S

I’ll upload a few in a separate post.

[Ralph Burgess]

Cape glossy starling

Lilac-breasted roller

Little bee-eater

Red-crested korhaan

Southern yellow-billed hornbill (male feeding female)

Tawny eagles

[Franco Darioli]

great photos!

I like the screaming korhann.

We don’t have any of those birds here in Australia. (that I know of…)

[Franco Darioli]

continuing the sub theme of animal behaviour, this afternoon after having taken a few more photos of kestrel N3 perched on one of her usual trees I walked away only to see her passing me and going up the hill. So I followed to see if I could get some photos of her hunting. When I reached the top it took me a minute or so to see her maybe 300 metres away looking for a prey.

She found one , got it, took to the air again and then came up to the top of the hill to hover over me for a couple of minutes and then drop down again to sit on a pole at the bottom of the hill to eat her grasshopper.

 

 

[Ralph Burgess]

Beautiful.  I’m still clueless about how to capture birds in flight.  You’ve got some skills there to capture a sequence like that.

[Jerry Adams]

yeah, same here

all of my bird pictures are a tiny blurry picture

zoom in:

[Roger Caffin]

There is no secret here. You can NOT take these sorts of photos with a phone: the laws of physics won’t let you. You need a big aperture, a high resolution sensor, and a camera which can be told to take the photo NOW, not in a second or two when it has sorted itself out. That means many thousands of dollars…

Cheers

[Franco Darioli]

Hi Ralph,

It is a combination of the right gear and plenty of practice.

Some, as with that kestrel, has to do with getting to know how certain animals react and even better once you get to know an individual they (may) slowly get used to you.

I have had that kestrel flying over me several times. It just happens that it can hover so it sits almost still in the air. Yesterday was a bit more difficult for both of us because it was very windy particularly at the top of the hill but she was very keen to show her prey.

I took photos of her for 12 minutes, not all were good but I have several similar to those above.

To give an idea , this is just after she cought the grasshopper at the bottom of the hill

That is taken at 600mm and of course I did not process the image because there is no point for me to do so. BTW, she is the size of a small pigeon and that is why most people walking in the area don’t see her or her mates.

 

 

[Roger Caffin]

I took photos of her for 12 minutes
This highlights a practical requirement which I had not mentioned: the camera needs a LOT of very FAST storage.
A lot, because you may be taking 100 photos to get one good one
Fast, because the camera needs to transfer the image off the sensor fast so you can take another photo quickly.

Cheers

[Franco Darioli]

Most birders do take literaly hundreds of photos in a day using 4-10 fps bursts (frames per second) .

I take 20-50  per afternoon  one photo at a time because I can’t be bothered to go home and spend hours sorting them out.

The unusualy long kestrel session compraised of  30 photos, several that I took simply to remember the sequence. The photos have the time enbedded ; that is how I know how long it took.

[Roger Caffin]

What do you do with the ‘not so good’ photos? Delete them from camera and hard disk?

Cheers

[Franco Darioli]

I transfer the photos I think look OK to a folder on my desktop.

I then process those shots (almost all bird photos are cropped for a start) , then store the result into another folder.

Then as the card gets full I transfer all of the original photos onto a separate portable HD, just in case I find anothe shot I like or I change the way a photo was processed and clear the card. (format)

 

[jscott]

“…but she was very keen to show her prey.”

This has been mentioned before but I think it deserves being underlined.

If nothing else it indicates that the bird recognizes you as another being who recognizes HER. And understands what she’s doing and what she’s feeling–delight and pride in her ability. She’s communicating a subjective state of being (an emotion in less pompous words.) I think this is more important–and more sophisticated–than tool making.

[Franco Darioli]

More about bird behaviour.

I used to have a real hard time trying to take a photo of a welcome swallow. I could never get close enough to have a sharp shot. A few weeks ago I started to get some results having had a good look at how they behave. Yesterday I noticed that on a particular spot, on the bridge where I often see them , they feel safe even when people walk less than a metre away as long as they don’t look at them and keep walking. Taking advantage of that I grabbed this photo today. Not a nice photo but it was taken from less than 2 metres away.

BTW, N3 was on a distant tree today because there were people walking around her usual spot. Still, I went there to say hello.

I noticed that she was looking at something behind me, so I turned around to see a heron sitting on a fence. She then took off hunting but not spotting anything and with people about she disappeared.

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