Birding by Camera

Anxiously awaiting the spring migration? Here are a couple of warblers people in eastern North America (or anyone with a field guide for the region) can practice identifying for now. The first three photos are of the same bird (not just the same species, but the same individual). This is one I hear much more often than see, and this individual does not exactly look like the drawing in my guide, but the yellow patch on its back in the second photo is diagnostic. For the song, imagine you hear a "rising buzzy trill, dropping abruptly at the end."

The next three photos are also of one bird. This one was much less familiar to me. Its song consists of "loud unevenly spaced chips, more rapid at the end."

I've found that using a camera instead of binoculars for birding has advantages and disadvantages. The disadvantages mostly have to do with the difficulties of getting the autofocus to pick out the tiny moving bird in the middle of the frame instead of one of the twigs or branches in front of or behind it (the last photo is uncropped to show how small the birds usually were in the frame), and getting the exposure correct when shooting against a bright sky. The big advantage, of course, is that if you do manage to get a decent shot, you have a record of what you saw. If you look at the field guide and see that you forgot to check for an eyebrow or didn't count the wing bars, you can just go back to the photo.

For those who are interested, I shot these with a Canon 7D dslr and the relatively affordable Canon 70-300 mm f4/5.6 telephoto zoom. But this is a case where a good, long prime lens would be more useful than a zoom (and of course have better image quality). I'm sure I always used 300 mm end for these warblers, and 400 mm would have been even better--you just don't often get very close to 'em.