The Bufflehead Birder

This past Sunday saw me at my favorite wetland pond where a couple of Wood duck broods spent a successful summer surviving the snapping turtles that dwell in the pond. A high growth of vegetation along the pond’s edge let me set up my scope and camera without disturbing the ducks.

By this time in the year the pond has slimed up with algae yet these ducks keep their vivid colors.

An ugly surprise lurks in the pond. Snapping turtles are one of the big perils young waterfowl have to avoid. Plenty of these things dwell in this pond. A snapper can pull a full grown Canada goose down and devour it. They also have amazingly long, longer than you would imagine, necks that can stretch and strike out over their backs.

Meanwhile, I put my fixed 30mm eyepiece on my scope. I did so upon some advice given in Mike’s Birding and Digiscoping Blog. Previously, I used my 20-60mm zoom. Most of the time I kept it wide open, but on occasion, just as many intermediate photographers do, I would zoom in just to see if I could get away with a closer shot. Sure, I got much closer compositions but I paid for it with poor light and blurry shots.

I am not sure why a fixed lens of the same magnification would be better than the zoom on that power setting, but I thought I might give it a try. Below is a shot of a brood from earlier this summer when I still had the 20-60 zoom in use.

I am still experimenting and will have to do a better comparison, but I feel there is a bit more brightness with the fixed eyepiece as seen in the below shot.

The young ducks spent a good deal of time preening (again, all that algae), stretching, flapping their wings and hissing at each other, before finally tucking their heads into their back feathers to nap.

Then a family came down to the pond yelling and excited, and nap time for the Wood ducks came to an end. The ducks headed for the other side of the pond and I headed for my car.

This may be hard to do, especially if you were in the Philly area during the last sweltering heat wave, but let’s try for the sake of this week’s post.

Picture a whipping wind shoving gray clouds across a pale mid-morning sky. This is how it was for me one Saturday last February when I took my new digiscoping equipment out for a real drive, not the 30-minute test drive at the nearby pond I spoke about in an earlier post.

Andorra Nature Center is located along the Wissahickon River. Not only is it located in a quiet part of the woods just off the walking trail along the river, but it also offers a complex of feeders, which is a boon to beginner digiscoper. Anywhere birds congregate is an excellent place to practice.

Firstly, there are lots of birds coming and going.

Secondly, there are always certain perches in the path of approach to a feeder that are used over and over by incoming birds. When these perches are noted, they make a handy place to focus your scope or camera while you settle in and wait. That’s the idea anyway.

However, keep in mind Hunter’s First Perch Principle:

If, the following is true:
X = likelihood of target bird using given perch
Y = frequency of scope or camera focused on given perch
Then, X will decrease in direct proportion to the increase of Y.

I stared at a lot of vacant perches until I got a few worthwhile shots.

Luckily, this principle did not apply to the path of approach used by the White-breasted Nuthatches. They liked to hop down the along the side of a nearby tree, stopping from time to time, and remaining still long enough for me to actually attempt a focus, before making the short flight to the feeder of choice.

White-breasted Nuthatch

Very cooperative, those Nuthatches, unlike a favorite friend pictured below.

Tufted Titmouse

The wind set my scope to vibrating, and although the low light conditions actually allowed me to see through my LCD viewer, it forced me to set my Coolpix P5100 to an ISO of 400 and to use the widest aperture possible. That made for grainier images but, at least they stood a better chance than the proverbial ice cube, of being in focus.

Carolina Wren and Downy Woodpecker

I stood huddled against the wind, clicking shots of Nuthatches, Downy Woodpeckers, Juncos, White-throated Sparrows, sometimes Tufted Titmice or Chickadees but more often of vacant perches. The wind was so high that trees bowed back and forth, and vicious gusts swept birds en masse off of the feeders and into the trees.

Chickadee with Seed

(Either Black-capped or Carolina. Black-caps have the more distinct white stripes on the wings. I couldn’t quite tell from my viewpoint.)

But the digiscoping thrill was on and I couldn’t stop. Just one more shot of the Nuthatch, or hey, now that Titmouse is finally on its perch, or what about a few more shots of those Juncos with their cheeks full of seeds?

And then there was a Red-bellied Woodpecker spinning around on the suet feeder while Titmice, Chickadees, and a Carolina Wren joined in. No chance here of a sharply focused shot, so I applied one of Mike’s digiscoping tips and took a video of the twirling feeder so that I could snatch a couple of in-focus stills from that later.
It was absolute Heaven.
Finally, 5 hours later, my fingers were too numb to shift the exposure dial, and the snow was starting to come down in a serious slant. It was time to beam back to the Home Planet and go get a hot coffee.

I am not one of those people who love to shop around. When I want something, I want it, and I want it NOW.

I had been thinking for several months about getting a bird spotting scope and a point and shoot camera to do some digiscoping. So when a Red-bellied woodpecker crawled around on a tree not 30 feet from me one day as I was wandering along a stream bed, I got a sudden hankering to bite the bullet and get the digiscope gear.

So first thing, I called my brother to ask what kind of spotting scope I should get if I want to get into digiscoping. My brother has been a bird photographer for a long time and knows about things like computers, cameras, scopes, GPS units, whatever. Why waste time looking online, reading stuff I won’t understand when a sibling is a phone call away, let alone just 2 miles down the road?

“You should really go online and check what’s out there,” he said.

I wasn’t happy about that because I had a bad case of the ‘nows’ and if I could just be advised of what to get now, then I could go get it now, and come back in a week to try and get a shot of that woodpecker before it grew old and died.

“Well, should I get a 65mm or an 80mm?” I asked into my cell phone. (No, I don’t normally chat on cell phones while in the woods. Please don’t think I do. I use it as a watch and it happened to be handy.)

“It depends what you like.”

How did I know what I like? He’s supposed to tell me. I groaned because it was now most likely to be yet another few months before I would figure out what I wanted and trust myself to make a good decision.

However, believe it or not, when I went online to research I really got into reading up on scopes and checking birding blogs to see what people use and what kind of shots they can get.

About a month after that woodpecker had given me that peck in the pants, my Swarovski 80mm ATS HD spotting scope arrived at my doorstep from Eagle Optics. A yippee moment for sure.

If you want to read more about my digiscope equipment please click on My Digiscope Set Up page. If not, you can enjoy the puzzle of the week coming up next.