A License to Bird

To be perfectly honest I’ve always been slightly disdainful of personalized (vanity) license plates, at least for me.   I generally prefer relative anonymity, partly because my natural inclination is to avoid bringing attention to myself (so why am I blogging?…)  Not to say that I don’t enjoy reading them on other vehicles while driving and I often have fun with the challenge of trying to figure out what some of them really mean.   Since I spend a lot of time photographing birds I occasionally run across “birder plates” at some of the refuges and marshes I frequent.  So recently, after the purchase of a new pickup, I decided to break out of my mold and join the crowd.    For me, “HARRIER” was almost a foregone conclusion if it was still available, and it was.  Many of the better images in my avian collection are of the Northern Harrier, which most folks refer to simply as “harrier”.   Whenever I’m forced to choose a favorite avian subject (a choice I don’t like to make) I typically choose this species.  They’re magnificent aerial athletes, beautiful, extremely challenging photographic subjects and they carry that “raptor mystique”.     Canon 7D, 1/3200, f/7.1, ISO 500, EV -0.33, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc After waiting over 6 weeks to have them delivered (come on Utah, get on the stick!) they finally arrived a few days ago.  Today was my first day photographing birds since I got them and I thought it fitting that I was able to get this shot of a juvenile male harrier taking off from a sagebrush out on Antelope…

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American Avocet Mating Displays

I’ve been fascinated by the mating displays of American Avocets ever since I first started photographing them almost five years ago.  This innate and complex choreography is almost identical in different mated pairs and from year to year.  The action happens quickly and is difficult to photograph well but I think I have enough decent images now to make an informative post about it.   Not all of the photos are of the highest quality but I think each of them illustrates the behavior well.   I’ll present several sequences of different birds that will illustrate most of the important stages of the process. I’m not going to include my techs with these shots -some of them were taken when I first started photographing birds and I made many mistakes in my setting choices.  Knowing some of these settings wouldn’t help anyone.   Avocets are monogamous and pairs form up in the spring when the female persistently associates with the male until she is eventually tolerated, then accepted as a mate.  The female initiates copulation by the posture you see above.  It’s called Solicitation Posture and in it she holds her neck extended far out and low.  At times it’s so low that much of the head, bill and neck are under water as you’ll see in a later image.      Once interested, the male performs Sexual Preening where he stands close to the female and extends his neck so that his bill tip can preen his breast (always on the side closest to her).   You’ll see that part of Sexual Preening in a later image but…

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Birds, Lamentations And Musings From My Recent Trip To Western Montana

Recently Mia and I spent just over a week in western Montana on another camping/photo excursion.  It was a trip packed with wonderful birds, breathtaking scenery, colorful characters and almost too much drama for me.  We spent two days at Red Rock Lakes National Wildlife Refuge, then four days on the western Montana farm near the Canadian border where I grew up and then spent one night at Red Rocks again on the way home.   In this post I’ll include a sampling of photos from the trip in the rough order they were taken.    Canon 7D, 1/1250, f/5.6, ISO 800, EV +1.00, 800 f/4, 1.4 tc This Long-billed Dowitcher photo was taken at a pond on the refuge that often has many birds of good variety but it’s difficult to get good light at this location.     Canon 7D, 1/2000, f/6.3, ISO 800, EV +0.00, 500 f/4, 1.4 tc This Least Sandpiper gave me a similar pose as in the previous shot but I liked the head turn and lighting better (even though it made the whites a challenge to expose properly).      Canon 40D @22mm, 1/60, f/14, ISO 500, EV +0.33 Mornings at Red Rocks are often spectacular.  Here the sun is just beginning to rise on a layer of ground fog with another layer of low clouds just above the fog.  Roads similar to and much worse than this one were the source of the drama I referred to earlier.  On this trip we had a total of four flat tires, most…

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“Baiting” – A Matter of Definition and Ethics

Baiting just may be the most hotly debated topic in the bird photography community.   Part of that debate revolves around the fact that not all nature photographers agree on a precise definition for the term.   I’ve followed and participated in discussions of this “hot topic” in nature photography discussion forums for years now and it seems that the most mainstream definition, the one that the vast majority of avian photographers subscribe to, is a version of this: baiting – using food or other items or methods to artificially lure birds in close to the photograpaher.  This would include using recorded bird calls, “setups”, back yard bird feeders, stuffed raptors (many birds come in to “mob” raptors) and a variety of other ingenious methods used by some well known “nature” photographers.  One of the most controversial forms of baiting is using live bait (often pet store mice) to bring in raptors – owls in particular.  This practice can have many negative efffects on the birds – from making them dependent on an artifical food source to spreading disease to causing birds to be hit by cars – not to mention the ethical dilemma of “nature” photographers photographing birds in unnatural situations.  To bait or not to bait is an ethical decision that virtually every bird photographer must make.  For me that decision was easy – I do not bait my intended subjects.  I do sometimes photograph birds at my back yard feeder simply for the practice but I don’t post those images on online forums, include them on my website…

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The Shot That Broke My Heart

There was a range fire on the north end of Antelope Island yesterday that forced managers to clear out all campers from the campgrounds.  So when we arrived early this morning the campgrounds were empty and this young coyote was hunting on the edge of Bridger Bay Campground.    Canon 7D, 1/2500, f/6.3, ISO 500, EV +0.33 Normally the coyotes on the island are elusive and difficult to approach but I believe this to be a young one so it didn’t seem overly concerned about us.  Besides, he/she obviously already had a quarry in sight deep in the grass and wasn’t about to let us interfere with the hunt.  In this image the coyote has just spotted something of interest in the grass some distance in front of “him”.     Canon 7D, 1/1600, f/8, ISO 500, EV +0.33 Here the coyote begins to make his stalk.  At first he didn’t crouch down so that he could see what ever it was he was after through the grass.      Canon 7D, 1/1250, f/8, ISO 500, EV +0.33 But as he got closer (both to the potential prey and to me) he began to crouch down, almost in a cat-like manner.  At this point I suspected that something dramatic might happen and tried to prepare myself for “the shot”.    The most common prey of coyotes on the island is voles but I was pretty sure it wasn’t a vole because the coyote was too far away from his point of interest when he first spotted it to…

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