Mother's Day

The weather on Mother's Day was beautiful. With plans to visit my Mom later in the day, I went for a walk with the kids to the park in town to give the dear mother of my kids a quiet afternoon at home.  I took the camera along and wandered the grounds around the playground.  I did not linger long by the playground with my long lens for fear someone would call the cops reporting a strange guy with a big camera taking pictures of kids - don't laugh, it's happened before.  Another blogger I follow had it happen to him once when was in a woodlot abutting a school yard!

I watched the always present Robins combing the "grass-scape" for works and grubs, pausing for a few seconds to scan the grass below, and then hopping the next five paces to another place to search.

American Robin

I watched this Common Grackle take on a different approach to finding food, or should I say, obtaining food.  When the Robins would find a grub or worm, the Grackle would swoop in and pounce.  The undersized Robin would drop the catch and flee, leaving the Grackle to pickup the fallen prize.

Common Grackle thief.

This Grackle did it a few times while I was watching and picked up a good supply of food, likely for a nest full of young somewhere nearby.

Common Grackle with stolen meal.

The familiar high pitched notes of an American Goldfinch caught my attention up in a tree.  It was serenading a female that was calmly sitting by while the male switched from branch to branch, singing its heart out hoping to convince the lady of its worth.

Male American Goldfinch with female in background.

Although I'm doubting it now, I'm pretty sure the bird in the background is the female. Usually Goldfinches are quite camera shy but it seems this pair was quite distracted and I could get quite close. Too bad they were way up in the tree.

male American Goldfinch singing away.

female American Goldfinch

male American Goldfinch

After returning from the park, I wandered behind our place in the church yard to see if any migrants might have stopped for a rest in our little area of town.  Way up in the tops of some old spruce trees was some movement and I took some pictures with harsh mid-day lighting.  The birds were constantly moving through the branches and it was a challenge to try and get a few good pictures.  Previewing the pictures I assumed they were Yellow-Rumped Warblers and didn't think much about it till editing them recently.  I'm still not 100 percent sure, but I think they were They were Cape May Warblers (Thanks Dwayne!).  I'm pretty sure the bird pictured below is a young male.  Life bird #203.

Cape May Warbler

These little birds prefer the spruce budworm, but also have a unique feature in the warbler world.  They have a curled, semi-tubular tongue which they use to gather nectar during the colder seasons after having migrated to the West Indies islands.

Cape May Warbler

What had actually brought me to these tall spruces was a Gray Catbird which was eluding me earlier.  I was able to get one quick shot as it played cat and mouse (yes, pun intended!) between the large row of stout spruce trunk bases.  Although not a great shot, I thought I'd include it as it shows, albeit obscured somewhat, the bright rusty colour under its tail.

Gray Catbird

We headed to my parents church in Cambridge for their second service, and afterwards, my youngest brother pointed out a neatly carved hole in an aging Maple tree in the front yard of the church.  Soon enough, the curious head of a Red-bellied Woodpecker appeared, giving away location of an active nest site.

Red-bellied Woodpecker in nest cavity.

Once it got used to us standing there, it seemed content to just watch us right back.

Red-bellied Woodpecker

Red-bellied Woodpecker

However, once the curiosity of the young boys running on the other side of the church lawn brought them over, the woodpecker had enough and fled with its trademark, scolding call.  We didn't stay long after that and let it return to the nest.

Just as we were about to leave, a Cooper's Hawk soared over, nice and slowly so I could get a reasonably clear picture as it coasted west, way above us.

Cooper's Hawk

That afternoon we headed to the Huron Natural Area near my parent's place for a walk before supper.  It's a beautiful spot in an area quickly being developed with new housing.  Great to see such a large area being left for conservation.  Since the camera was in use for capturing our family time, I didn't do a lot of bird searching or photography.  I was surprised though that there weren't more birds to be seen then we did.

Spring fiddlehead in the afternoon sun.

We headed back to the home of half my childhood (after we moved) and enjoyed time with family and spent time appreciating my great Mom!!

Mourning Dove

I'd almost completely forgotten....  My outing earlier that day had been to take my first run with our new camera.  I had convinced Henry's to drop an already sale price on a Sony a65 to replace our dead a33. After quite a bit of research (online and talking to various Sony and Henry's staff), I'd determined fixing our stuck shutter was likely to be between $400 and $500.  I ended up getting the new camera for barely more than that.  On top of that, the a33's shutter had already died on us once with the camera being replaced for us under warranty.  With it having hinted at a failure earlier and then finally dying, I was nervous about spending that much money on a shutter system with known problems.

For those of you proud Nikon or Canon owners who I'm sure are right now wondering why I still went with a Sony... already owning Sony lenses meant I was not going to start over again with a whole new camera system.  There are things I really like about the Sony cameras, and then other days when I really wish I could get another stop or two of light without the "transparent mirror" in the way.

Image grabbed from Sony's website of the a65

So far from my few outings with the new a65, here are my pros and cons:

Pros
Bigger: Yes, I found the a33 too small.  I don't have huge hands, but when you're gripping a camera for a few hours on an outing, it actually is a pain having a small camera in your hands.
Faster: It can shoot 10 fps with continuous AF but AE locked after the first shot, and 7 with adjusting AE. That's nice and fast!  And when capturing while panning, the lag problem with the display of the last picture is greatly reduced.
24.3MP: Though really it's getting pretty high, if you really get the focus right, you can crop in nice and close on a distant subject.
Additional Focus Mode:  Sony has added one new focus mode which groups all the sensors in a field of three.  That limits it from hunting as much when there is varied  focus items.
Overheating: Or rather, the lack there of!!! In warm weather, the a33 would constantly overheat on me and shut off.  That was extremely annoying!!  I will not miss that.  Almost reason enough to switch just for this!
new OLED viewfinder: Sony has upgraded the digital viewfinder.  In normal lighting, you can hardly tell anymore that it's not optical.  It has almost double the pixels of the a33, and with the OLED compared to LED, it uses less power and presents much cleaner when displaying motion.

Cons
Programmable button: I changed the D-Range button on the a33 to focus mode so I could switch quickly between single point focus and wide (say a noticed a bird in flight and needed to switch quickly).  However, though the a65 does the same, the only button I don't want remove its normal mode from, can't utilize the customized mode in Manual mode.  Why, I do not know!  I usually shoot in fully manual.

Multi Shot Self Timer: This is a general gripe.  I don't know if any of the other SLR brands have this, but I can't for the life of me understand why they don't have a feature to shoot a sequence of multiple pictures on self timer.  Our old Panasonic FZ30 (now that was a great camera in its day!!) had this.

Ok, have any of you other photographers had this idea?
"Camera, ISO 400"
"Camera, Focus, Point"
"Camera, Focus, Burst"
Being able to have the camera obey voice commands to adjust functions without having to shift to another hand hold for another button and change a mode would be great!  Maybe that feature would price the camera completely out of my market I don't know, but you'd think with all the voice control on our phones, that technology has been mastered?


But to wrap it up, a post mother's day thanks to my Mom who is very dear to me.  She's a great mom and now is a great grandmother to our kids!  She throws her heart and soul into everything she does, sometimes so much that it takes a little too much out of her I fear. ;)  I love you Mom and thank God for you and your huge impact on who I am!

Until next time...
Keep enjoying HIS handiwork!

Backyard Birds

A quick post to try and catch up a bit here on the new lens binge (?) :).

I took a few pictures around the backyard a Sunday or two ago. There wasn't a lot of bird activity despite the slightly warmer temperatures, but I got some nice pictures of some of the Robins hunting the lawn.  We can tend to ignore and forget the beauty of some of the common birds we see often.

male American Robin

It's a fun challenge to try and get more than just typical shots, with more reason when you have a common bird as a subject.  I was trying very hard to get a shot of a Robin pulling a freshly caught worm from the ground, but it seemed like every time, they'd be facing away from me when they got one!  This was the best I could do.

American Robin swallowing a worm.

American Robin profile.

An alarm went up from the Robins and looking up I saw this Cooper's Hawk circling.  It likely lives somewhere in the area.  Holly and the kids have seen one a number of times over the years as it has dropped in at the bird feeder, hoping to snack on one of the seed eating birds.  It must have been out for a joy ride on the thermals of the new heat of spring... Cooper's Hawks are known more for surprise tactics rather than the Red-tailed Hawk like soaring.  Cooper's Hawks will easily surprise and eat a Robin for supper, so their alarm and fast move for cover was understandable.

Cooper's Hawk soaring

A pair of Mourning Doves were having a romantic nap on our deck bench after preening and courting each other with beak touching and a shuffle around in a circle.

Puffed up Mourning Dove pair.

I have a few more posts to come... a trip to Bayfront Park (hadn't been there in ages) and a combined trip to Valley Inn Road and Woodland Cemetery.  We'll see when I have time to do the post. :)

I hope everyone is enjoying the warmer spring weather.  Today was a beauty and I got to enjoy it with my three boys who are now old enough to all really help Dad with cutting down and hauling away tree for next winter's heat!

Mixed Bag of Birds

Bald Eagle just about to slip out of view behind a sappling.

I've made a few different trips over the last few weeks.  As mentioned in my last post, I went back to the Brantford Bald Eagle nest to if there was any activity to capture.  In fact there was, but I mistakenly took my uncharged battery and missed some nice opportunities.  For a short while, a seagull decided to protest the larger predator, bombing the bird from above and putting forth a very noisy statement of its dislike for the eagle's presence in the airspace around the nest.

As I think I mentioned previously as well, there was regular movement of Buffleheads, Common Merganser, and Canada Geese along the river, giving great opportunity for flight pictures to those with a charged battery - not me.  I did get one half decent shot of a pair of Common Mergansers before my battery retired.

Pair of Common Mergansers over muddied waters of Grand River

On the way home from church with the boys last week, we saw White-tailed Deer in the distance of a farmer's field.  The waning light allowed only for 1600 ISO or higher pictures and slow shutter speeds.  Not conducive to trying to capture some frisky does who were obviously enjoying the early warmness of a spring evening.  As you can hopefully see in the picture below, they were jaunting up to each other and then springing lightly into the air.  Spring fever I think.

Frisky White-tailed Deer does.

On the way to a meeting the other night, I stopped briefly to watch a huge Red-tailed Hawk perched in the glow of the setting sun, nicely lit in the golden rays, but too far away for a good picture.  Driving on my way again, the familiar shape of a hawk came into view.  Strangely, its aggressive wing beaten path slowly began to merge with my road bound direction, matching my speed of about 80km/h.  But then, with a sudden burst of speed, it veered away, dropped in elevation, and then swooped up into a large maple at the side of the road and with amazing agility, manoeuvred through the branches into the centre of the tree top to capture a Red-winged Blackbird.  I quickly turned around and was able to capture the picture below just as it took off with a late evening meal to devour.  You can see the flash of red and yellow giving evidence to the species of supper.  It's a terribly blurry shot, but still had to share as proof of my story.

Cooper's Hawk with Red-winged Blackbird catch.

Below is a video showing the agility of a Goshawk which is known for the same ability as the Cooper's Hawk - flying through dense brush to surprise small prey including birds, squirrels, chipmunks, etc.  They have an amazing ability to fly through tight spaces, keeping on track and ultimately nabbing the target.  I often marvel at the amazing diversity of tactics wildlife use for catching, luring, and killing prey.  To me it speaks of a creative Designer, and not to the theory that these methods evolved out of the need for survival.  In my mind, the latter would produce a more uniform set of methods only produced out of practical needs and easily developed solutions.  I'd be glad to hear your thoughts if you think differently.

Later in the week, I made a brief stop at Mountsberg on my way back from a work meeting, spending my "lunch hour" to drive the back roads in the area.  On my short jaunt, I saw a Northern Shrike sitting atop of a hedgerow in a farmer's field not far from the road.  Just as I jumped out of my car, it flew off, even though I for once had my camera out and ready for such an event.  No picture.  A significant life bird for me though.

Driving around some more, I did get to see some more common birds, but not may pictures.

Mourning Dove just north of Mountsberg

I headed to Grass Lake last Sunday with my youngest son Justin, to see if we could find the Sandhill Cranes which are reported to be back for their annual summer stay on that lake.  Justin was proudly decked out with his own binoculars...Canadian Tire had a pair on sale for $8 - perfect for all three of my boys who at this point stick dirty fingers on the glass and drop them on the ground when something else interests them suddenly.  We didn't see the cranes, but I did hear and see in the distance an Eastern Meadowlark.  Dad, remember your "wordification" of their song "This-is-my-hydro-tower" from our years on Pinedale Drive?

I thought this blurry shot of a Canada Goose flying over us was kind of interesting.  Blurry, but something about it I like.

Canada Goose

The Red-winged Blackbirds were all noisily courting.  Strange how the duller coloured ones always seem to be the ones closest to the camera... some are definitely have brighter colouring.  This one's wings were tipped with a tinge of light brown.  Not sure if this a first year adult just loosing it's juvenile plumage?

Red-winged Blackbird

On the way home I just happened to notice this Yellow-shafted Norther Flicker.  I was able to get surprisingly close (Never close enough though!!!  Full frame shots are just a dream with a 300mm lens and this is significantly cropped still).  I'd love to capture these birds in flight - that's when the yellow underside of the wings bursts in a flash as they make their flitting, undulating flight typical of a woodpecker.

Yellow-shafted Northern Flicker

All in all, though none of the specific trips on their own felt like a spectacular success, I've seen some noteworthy birds and sites, and the weather is spectacular, if not strangely odd.  We'll see what the next weeks bring.  April snow storms have happened a few times over the last years!