I’ve been taking a lot of bird photos lately, mostly around my house, honing my technique. These are a few collections of some of the birds in my area.
This Blue Jay was pulling this string around our tree in the front yard. The string was used during Halloween to hang decorations and I originally thought the bird got caught in it, but the more I watched, the more I realized it was pulling the string along. There was another Blue Jay there so they might have been working on a nest. I haven’t seen them since so I don’t think that turned out to be the case.
The first four images are a couple different Woodpeckers. One made a nest in our back tree and the other was hanging out at the top of a huge tree at Willand Pond. I thought the last bird was a Woodpecker as well, but apparently it is a White-breasted Nuthatch. I found it when I went out for a few minutes during my lunch break and it was so cool the way it walked up and down the tree.
My final group of images are my favorite American Robin, which is the most abundant bird in my yard – we have a ton of them and I get a lot of photos. I’m kind of over them to a point, but on the other hand they provide a really great way to measure if my technique is improving. The first image is the closest I’ve ever been able to get to a bird of that size. The image was taken at 600mm on my D500 (so 900mm equivalent) and this bird just didn’t seem to mind that I was nearby.
The next couple are of an adorable nest. It was late in the day, so these images were taken at ISO 36,000 on my D500 and subsequently de-noised by PureRAW. I missed the parent feeding the babies, but I got it as it flew away and tried to bring back some worms. I was too close to the nest and freaked it out a bit, resulting in the third image of it flapping its wings. I realized I was too close at that point and moved away.
My Robins round out with another one that let me get close as well as one that let me capture it with a mouth full of worms. I’m still astounded that we have so many worms in our ground. We have Robins hopping around all the time plucking worms and grubs out of the ground.
Relatively Ambitious 