The Great Backyard Bird Count

This weekend was once again time for the annual GBBC sponsored by The Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Audubon.  I am always looking for a good excuse to go out and photograph birds and my wife is really into finding, identifying, and observing birds so off we went this weekend for two days of birding.

I am still in Mountain Home, Arkansas so the bird counting took place in and around Mountain Home with the best results at Bull Shoals State Park and Gaston's Resort property.

We found flocks of Ring-billed Gulls on the White River, add 49 birds to the count!

There were many song birds at both locations.  This pair of Cardinals was flying around the area, hunting food.  We identified 37 species of birds over the two day period, saw hundreds, and I photographed 19 species.

One of the most common songbirds was the Robin.  Robins were very active both on the ground and in the trees.  They were very actively looking for food.

Ideally, all of these images would be taken with a camera firmly attached to a tripod but walking around looking for birds does not lend itself well to working with a tripod.  The birds are in the wild and not easily approached.  When they appear, it is usually for a very brief period of time and you either quickly get the shot or you get nothing.

All of the songbird images were made using a Nikon D300s and Nikon 80-400 image stabilized lens, handheld. (Thanks to AP for the lens)  I upped the ISO rating to 640 to get a faster shutter speed and shot wide open at f5.6.  In direct sun this gave me a shutter speed of about 1/2000 second.  Even with that fast shutter speed the image of the Cardinal in flight is not very sharp.


On the afternoon of the second day we hit the jackpot!  We had heard about an Eagle nest on the White River at Gaston's Resort.  Jim Gaston, the owner of the resort, loves nature and photography.  He has set aside almost a mile of riverfront land with trails and numerous feeders and birdhouses to make his property a natural preserve for wildlife.  In addition to making the property available to guests of his resort, he generously allowed us to walk his trails with photo gear and spotting scopes.

I had heard that the eagles nest had fallen in a storm so we were not sure that we would find eagles.  Jackpot!  The nest was rebuilt and occupied by, I assume, a female eagle sitting on her eggs.  But that's not all!!  The nest was in a tree that was behind a tree that was an active Great Blue Heron rookery!  I counted about 12 nests, nine in one group of trees right in front of the eagle nest.

There is a lot going on in this image.  It was shot with the 80-400 lens at 360mm.  In the lower left corner you can see the eagles nest with what looks like two white heads peeking over the top.  It is actually one head and the tail of one eagle sitting on the eggs.  There are nine Great Blue Heron nests with one GBH in flight and seven Herons sitting on the nests.

The bad news here is that the nests are across the river on the far river bank.  My best guess is that they are 300-400 feet away and there is no way to get closer for detailed shots.

I am less that 1/2 mile from my car so I walked back to get my biggest lens, a Nikon 500 f4 P and 1.4X teleconverter.  The Nikon 500 f4 P is a very nice lens but it is old, without any of the new features like IS or even autofocus.  In this situation it is the only way I can get a closer view but from this distance, really tack sharp shots will not happen with this lens and tripod combination.

I am using a Nikon D300s camera which has a 1.5X multipler based on the DX chip.  With this camera, lens and tele-converter combo, the effective lens focal length is 1,050mm and the fastest aperture is f5.6!  With this setup, using an aperture of f5.6 or f8, I estimate that the DOF is no more than 1.5 - 2 feet.  It is a real challenge to manually focus with that much accuracy at that distance PLUS the whole rig moves at the slightest touch!  I am using a heavy Gitzo tripod with Wimbly gimble head but it is far from rock solid with this much focal length.

Usually I think that the Eagles are the stars of any show but as I watched this scene I found that the Herons were putting on a magnificant show with mating activities, nest building, and aggressive actions between the competing males.

The birds are in their breeding attire with magnificant plumage and bright yellow beaks.  This pair was competing for territory and I could hear their calls even though I was almost 400 feet away.  They were striking at each other with their sharp pointed beaks.  Now, lets put this into perspective because if you are not familiar with Great Blue Herons you cannot appreciate the danger here.  First, these are very large aggressive birds.  An adult GBH is about four feet tall with a six foot wing span.  Their bill is about 6" long and very sharp.  I have watched them spear fish with that bill and they easily run it through a fish.  I have been told that they can run their bill through a wooden boat paddle so this is not a no risk territorial dispute!

They both seem to be very good at dodging and blocking attacks.  I watched them for about 30 minutes as they argued and aggressivly fought over the rights to this nest.  Fortunately neither bird was injured.

The other interesting behavior that was going on was courtship.  Great Blue Herons mate for a season and work cooperatively to build a nest.  The male gathers nest material and presents it to the female.  The female accepts the material and builds the nest.

In this part of the country, the birds pair up and build nests in February.  They seldom build alone and usually create rookeries with many birds nesting in a single or group of trees.  This rookery had about 12 nests in two groups of trees.  The larger group had nine nests.

In the middle of the afternoon, most of the nests were occupied but by only one bird.  By around 5pm more birds began to arrive and by about 30 minutes before sunset, most of the nests had a mated pair of birds in it.

I do not believe that the birds have laid eggs but that should start to happen within the next two weeks.  They typically have 3-6 eggs and the male and female share the responsibility of sitting on the eggs for the 25-30 days required for them to hatch.

Looks like it might be a hot night in Heronville tonight!

The Herons kept me entertained and busy for the afternoon but I was also keeping an eye out for the missing mate to the Eagle sitting on the nest.  After about three hours I spotted a Bald Eagle making a flyby.  I assumed that this was the returning mate so I quickly framed the nest and did the best job I could of focusing.  The long wait paid off, about 5 minutes after the flyby I spotted the Eagle returning behind the line of trees and I had about 10 seconds to get ready for it to land on the nest.

As I waited for the return of the Eagle, I imagined that he would bring a gift of food to his mate when he returned to the nest.  Not so, it looks like a piece of moss or other choice nesting material.  Before I go farther, let's separate fact from speculation.  Once the eggs are laid, Eagles share the responsibility of sitting on the eggs and the eggs are never left alone until the babies hatch.  There is no easy way to tell the difference between the male and female Eagle so I really don't KNOW which Eagle had been setting on the eggs for the past 3 hours and which was out roaming the area.  I assume that the female was on the nest and the male was out and this is my story so that's the way it was!

After three+ hours of sitting on the nest without a break, the female had some choice words for her mate.  I am not sure if it was his choice of gift (I would have gone for a fine dinner, nest material is kind of like a washing machine for Valentines day) or his prolonged absence but the neglected female had lots to say and then she left the nest and perched on a nearby tree.

I stayed and watched the couple until after sundown but the female never returned to the nest.

I'm sure that I am imprinting human traits on these birds, but I swear it looked like the male was in the nest with a "hangdog" look while the female sat on this perch about 30 feet away and glared at him.  I can only say that given a choice, I would rather be in Heronville tonight.  I left about 20 minutes after sunset and she was still sitting on that perch glaring at the nest.

Working with a long telephoto lens is very challenging.  The longer the lens the more technical the job becomes and the more demanding.  Equipment is very imporant and can make the job easier but good photographers were getting great images long before image stabilization and auto-focus were developed.  If you have a long lens in the 500mm neighborhood, work to get it as stable as possible on your tripod.  One thing I can do to reduce camera shake is to use mirror lock-up.  This would reduce the camera shake caused by the mirror slapping up and down.  I can also add an extra stabilization point to the lens to stop the movement I am getting when I release the shutter. 

I hope that this post inspires you to get out there and make some images and gives you some ideas on how to make better telephoto images using the equipment that you already have.  Even if you have the most modern IS lens, good technique can make your images even better.  Don't let technology be an excuse for sloppy technique!