The Indigo Hill Big Sit 2011 Slide Show

Our friends at Wingscapes have been touting their PlantCam as a neat way to take timelapse photographs of plants or anything else. I decided to set my PlantCam to take a photo every 10 minutes during the 2011 Big Sit. And this slideshow is the result. Pretty neat if you ask me!

More on the Big Sit in the coming days.

Blurry is Beautiful

Big orange sunset
I almost threw you away
blurry beautiful

Kismet at Kumul

My first image of the Kumul Lodge grounds, shot with flash.

Sometimes you take a photograph and think it's nothing special, only to discover later that you captured something surprising in it. On my trip last September to Papua New Guinea I had a bit of photographic serendipity one evening, though it would be weeks before I'd realize it.

Our group was staying at Kumul Lodge near Mt.Hagen, a very rustic destination famous among birders for its amazing feeding station which attracts tiger parrots, ribbon-tailed astrapias, and brown sicklebills, among other species. I plan to devote a blog post or two to the Kumul Lodge feeding station once I have a bit more time for writing. Just before dinner one evening, I thought to take a photo of the lodge's grounds and buildings. Standing near the main building I snapped a few images with my Canon G-11, switching settings between photos in an attempt to capture the mood of the scene in the fading daylight.

The first shot (top of this post) was taken on Auto, with the flash engaged. It washed out the beautiful cloudy sky and lit up the buildings.

My second shot of the grounds, without flash.

My second image was more moody, capturing the sky and silhouetted trees, and giving just a hint of the buildings. But something else in the center of the image caught my eye... it looked like a detached part of the tree.

A closer look—probably a mountain swiftlet.

A closer look revealed a bird swooping across the dusk-filled sky, captured kismetically in the image I shot. I'm guessing it's probably a mountain swiftlet because this species was ubiquitous at Kumul and elsewhere.

Kismet is a word of Turkish derivation meaning "destiny." I love thinking that my life and this swiftlet's life crossed for a millisecond, connected by a camera's lens, in the only moment it could have possibly happened, on the far side of the world.

King of Saxony Bird-of-Paradise!

Male King of Saxony bird-of-paradise displaying.

We left things hanging earlier this week when I described getting my first look at a King of Saxony bird-of-paradise. I would have been back with the goods sooner but my trusty Mac laptop needed a brain transplant in the interim. But we're back now! And one of us has a new brain!

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Somehow the gods were smiling on us that morning—perhaps to make up for the long journey we'd had the day before and the cold, rainy, late-afternoon arrival at our first bit of decent bird habitat. Now, standing along the Highlands Highway, with a singing male King of Saxony bird-of-paradise in front of us, we might not have imagined things could get any better. And then the sun came up behind us, illuminating the scene in a wash of golden color, burning off just enough of the morning mist so we could get sparklingly clear looks at this amazing beast before us.

He waved his head plumes back and forth, uttering the occasional song. We stood gob-smacked for a spell, and then came to life as we realized we had a chance to capture images of this aparition.


Imagine a large black, yellow, and white roundish bird with giant, spidery, iridescent feathers coming (seemingly) out of its ears. I struggled to find words to describe the head plumes. They were like pheasant tail feathers in length, but their bright metallic blue spots made them look like something from a Lady Gaga video.


One of our group asked "What King of Saxony was this bird named for?" I did not hear the answer ( it turns out it was Albert King of Saxony, whose full name was Frederick Augustus Albert Anton Ferdinand Joseph Karl Maria Baptist Nepomuk Wilhelm Xaver Georg Fidelis—a name as long as the head plumes of the bird that bears his moniker.) I guess we're lucky they did not pick one of his other names for this magnificent species. Nepomuk bird-of-paradise does not really cut it.

I thought of something different to myself, and apparently spoke this out loud: "They should just call it the King Sexy bird-of-paradise!" On this point we all concurred.

Here is the video I shot via my digiscoping rig. I apologize in advance for the background sounds of me struggling to pull another camera out of my waist pack. The King Sexy had me all shook up.

My Camera Lens is Fixed!

The mystery of my streaky images was not elementary my dear hoatzin.

Sometime back in late 2008 my Canon 300mm fixed lens took a bump (or ate bad hummus) and began showing occasional image abnormalities. This problem was especially obvious in shots with a dark-green background. In these shots there would be diagonal streaks from upper left to lower right through the image. Initially I thought these streaks were a by-product of my near-complete ignorance of camera settings—things like ISO and aperture and TV, AV, and A-DEP. But since they did not appear in every shot, I assumed the problem was due to "operator error." I've been accused of that before.

Soon I noticed that my images just were not as sharp as they should be. You know the feeling of getting a very cooperative subject, snapping off a bunch of frames, liking what you see on the camera's playback window, but once you look at it on the computer, you see that the focus is just off enough to render the shot useless? A non-keeper? That's where I was with my camera rig.

I was frustrated. So I did the unthinkable. I read the camera's manual. It was no help.

I did every imaginable Google search. (Oh, and by the way, don't ever do a search for images containing the word "Streaking." You'll never recover). Still no answers to why the images were soft and streaky.

Next I did a series of tests with the camera using other lenses and determined that the problem was with my 300mm lens, not my Canon 30D camera.

I called Canon and it was determined that I needed to send the lens in for a check-up and possible repair. I did this. And for a mere $120, and two weeks of repair work, I got my 300mm lens back as good as nearly new.

The hoatzin photograph above shows the diagonal streaks that plagued me. I can't tell you how many images that anomaly ruined, but it was a healthy number.

But now, all fixed up, my camera and lens are taking images like this:

Male ruby-throated hummingbird image shot with the recently repaired lens.

I am SO happy! And no, I STILL don't know what ISO is.

For Whom the Bellbird Tolls

Bearded bellbird.

Not very far down the jungle trail from the main building of the Asa Wright Nature Centre, there's a sign that says Bearded Bellbird. When I first saw this, I thought "Right, like the birds always hang around right by the sign! How conVEEENient!"

Just then, the loud, ringing call note for which these birds are named clanged down from the forest canopy. There WAS a bearded bellbird and it was up there somewhere, calling repeatedly.

Moments later, Julie shouted "I've got the bellbird!" And she did. We scrambled into position to find the bird for binocular looks. Then we trained our spotting scopes on it. The bird was fairly close, reasonably well-lit, and every time it gave a note, its rastalike black wattles (or "beard") shook like wet spaghetti.

How sweet this was—my first decent look at a bellbird, one of those tropical species that jumps out at you from the field guide pages when you're dreaming of life birds. I'd heard bellbirds before. But seeing is bell-lieving.

I took a few still photos with my Leica digiscoping rig, then decided to shoot a short digital video. Here's what the bearded bellbird looked and sounded like at Asa Wright Nature Centre in Trinidad on Monday, July 20, 2009.

All I can add to this post is that bellbirds are LOUD! Talk about a bad bird to have around when you had a hangover. Not that that has ever happened to me. I'm just saying...

Quick Comparison: Digiscoping vs. D-SLR

Taking pictures in the rainforest—any rainforest or jungle or woods—is a challenge particularly due to the lack of light. On the recent digiscoping trip we took to Trinidad and Tobago, sponsored by Leica Sport Optics, I got to compare the relative difficulty and success/failure rate of taking photographs with a digiscoping set-up versus taking photographs with a professional-grade digital SLR camera.

My loaner digiscoping rig consisted of a Leica APO-Televid HD-65mm spotting scope, a Leica D-Lux 4 digital camera, and a bayonet-mount digiscoping adaptor.

My big-rig digital SLR camera is a Canon 30D with a 300mm fixed, image-stabilized, lens.

One of the images above (a female rufous-tailed jacamar) was taken with each set-up. I took these shots moments apart from one another on a trail in Gilpin Trace rainforest on Tobago.

Both images are just as they were taken, no adjustments to color, sharpness, or cropping. Both were exported as jpegs for use in Blogspot.

Can you guess which one was taken with which rig?

Canon 30D Digital SLR image.

Leica digiscoping rig image.

I know from other attempts at digital SLR photography in the deep, dark jungle, that it can be really hard to get good "keeper" photos, especially without the use of a tripod and a bracket-mounted flash unit. When I returned from the Philippines last spring, I was crushed to see how few of my D-SLR images were good enough to keep. Some of this was the result of low-light conditions, some of it was due to "operator error" and some of it was just plain old bad luck.

This is where digiscoping can really pay big dividends for the bird watcher who also likes to snap a few images of birds that happen to cooperate. If a bird sits still for more than a few seconds, it's a candidate for digiscoping. The only downside is that you do need to haul a spotting scope with you in order to digiscope most effectively.

The Leica scopes we were using are the new, top-of-the-line models. Mine was the APO-Televid 65. The coatings and lenses on these scopes gather an incredible amount of light. The focus on them is super-fine. Combining this with the high-end compact Leica cameras we were using, and we had a nearly perfect set-up for digiscoping.

And the images? Well, I can't resist showing off one more digiscoped image from that same day.

Male collared trogon, Gilpin Trace, Tobago, WI.

I'll go deeper into the digi-details in future posts. If you're interested in learning more about digiscoping, there are a number of fine websites and blogs online with all the information you need to get started. If you're more of a hands-on learner, the Midwest Birding Symposium is offering two separate two-hour sessions with many of birding's best digiscopers, including pros from Leica, Zeiss, Swarovski, Nikon, and Eagle Optics. We're calling it The Digiscoping All-stars, and it's free to all registered attendees. Details about the Digiscoping All-stars can be found here.

Long Days, Great Light

Morning sun on barn and meadows near Belt, MT.

We've recently returned from a week apiece in North Dakota and Montana. In addition to adjusting to the different landscape, different birds, and earlier time zones (Central and Mountain Time) of the western Great Plains, I've found notable differences in the light. It's more buttery or lemony early and late in the day, but also brighter during the mid-day hours. American white pelicans that at dawn look pinkish or creamy yellowish-white, are blindingly white at noon.

One other major difference is the length of the day at these more northerly latitudes. It starts getting light shortly after 4:30 am and you can still read a book or ID a bird through your binocs at 10:15 pm! I found this especially noticeable during the two nights we were camping along the Missouri River. The poor-wills were still calling when the western kingbirds and western meadowlarks began their morning vocal crescendi.

End of the day Slaughter River, MT.

Not that I minded that. It is fear that motivates me to get up early when on vacation: fear that I will miss out on something cool or amazing or beautiful. And I want to squeeze every last drop of juice out of the plum that is my "vacation" (even when it is a mostly working vacation trip as this one was). So I always stay up late and get up early, camping or not, when traveling.

Pheasant under grass, early morning near Pingree, ND.

Here are a few of the scenic views that caught my eye and camera during the first two weeks of June when I was way out west.

Sunset behind our cabin at Lakeview Meadow Resort, near Jamestown, ND.

Sun sparkles over sage, Little Sandy Creek, MT.

More sun sparkles over sage, Little Sandy Creek, MT.

Dusk settling in at Stonewall Canyon along the Missouri River.

How many sunsets have these stone walls seen?

The Reality of Warbler Photography

Cameras purchased by bird watchers who want to become bird photographers should come with a warning sticker that says:

Bird photography is not as easy as it looks.
In fact, it's not even close to being easy!
You need to be prepared to be extremely disappointed
in the images you'll be getting despite spending all this money.
Don't say we didn't warn you.
And no, there's nothing wrong with your camera.

That sort of fair warning/truth in advertising would go a long way to helping me feel better about the plethora of warbler images I take that look like this:

Or the ones that look like this:


Or this. Great photo of vegetation, perfectly in focus, hiding a blurry bird.



And then, before you figure things out, the bird bolts. Sweet!

But if the birding gods are smiling, the bird does a 180 and stops to check you out for just five seconds more, and you get this (below), an image which is JUST GOOD ENOUGH to keep you coming back, camera in hand, chasing after colorful fleeting things with wings.


Cropping and tweaking results in an image that is good enough for the old blog, but probably won't pass muster for the cover of National Geographic. Still, what a handsome devil this male magnolia warbler is!

Happy shutter-bugging to every bird watcher who is similarly afflicted.

Reading the Clouds

I've always been a watcher of the sky.

I'm fascinated by its ever-changing visage and by how one can read the clouds to predict what weather is to come.

One evening during our recent trip to New Mexico the clouds, wind, and sunset combined to create this scene above. I at once thought the pink clouds looked like a woman praying or perhaps about to leap into action from a crouch.

Today I looked at the wider shot (below) and thought it might be a chomping crocodile. Crouching Woman, Hidden Crocodile.


What do you see? Woman or crocodile or something else all together?

New Mexico in Low Light

New Mexico is called The Land of Enchantment but it could just as easily be called The Land of Amazing Light. I can see now why photographers and artists come here to pursue their creative muses--the light goes from pale lemony to deep tangerine to milky blue and then back again in the course of a day. The air is clear and the vistas are vast. And then there are the places where the desert meets the mountains. It's one giant inspiration of light.

Here are just a tiny few of the digital images I've shot this week in New Mexico's low light--early and late in the day.

Pintails at dawn over Bosque del Apache NWR.

At dawn the birders and photographers gather on the Flight Deck for the morning fly out of the cranes and waterfowl.

A pre-dawn blizzard of snow geese.

Cranes and waterfowl darken the dawn sky at Bosque.

Phragmites is an invasive scourge, but its heads look feathery in the afternoon sunlight.

Sunset uses the same pink paintbrush on the desert and the mountains.

A drake pintail in the predawn glow.

Cranes are still flying well after sunset.

A Chihuahuan raven croaks at its flockmates.

Coots a half hour before first light.

The morning sun peeks through a notch in the rim of Water Canyon.

Pintails over pink clouds at Bosque.


Gleaming wires near El Salto del Rey.

A tangerine sunset from Arroyo Seco.