Fun with birds on perches

Hey all:

I saw that the cloudy weather was finally about to break after a zillion cloudy, rainy days, so I headed out into the blind to do some avian work. The light was overcast but pretty bright, and I got in a couple hours of shooting before the sun came out completely and ruined things.

Here they are, in no particular order. All with the Canon 30D and Canon 100-400L IS at 200 to 400mm, iso200, apertures from f7.1 to f8, shutter speeds from 1/200 to 1/500, tripod.


Immature male red-winged blackbird

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Very nice set Steve and I have been photographing Juncos recently as well. Great colors in the juvie RWB and I don't recall seeing one at that stage before. The Fox gets a lot of my attention since it's my favourite sparrow. The last Junco is probably my favourite one here and the coloring is a little different from the ones we have here but that is to be expected since they vary so much from one area to another.

Thanks, Gary. I like the last junco best because of the way the browns in the bird are echoed in the antler. I'm going to have to work to get most of our sparrow species up out of the lawn grass and onto low perches so I can do more with them.

Stunning series Steve. You really captured their beauty in these shots. Well done.

Oh deer - what an unusual perch! An excellent series of bird shots.

Very nice series Steve. I just saw a Junco here yesterday. Looks like they are back.

Wow!! Pretty shots Steve.

Thanks for sharing.

Henry

They seen to love that Antler, Nice Work here Steve

Well done Steve. I've yet to see and photograph a Fox Sparrow. How did you get the junco's to perch out in the open? They're usually at the base of my cedar hedge.

Thanks, everybody.

Stephen, one of the ways I make sure the birds will use the perch is to take down all the feeders except the tray feeder right in front of the perch. By usually having up four feeders I get large numbers of birds, and so by removing those feeders for a few hours at a time every week or two, all that concentration of birds focuses on the single feeder. And the perch is a staging perch. Birds use it before they're going to land on the feeder or when the feeder is too full and they're waiting their turn. As for the juncos, 95 percent of the 100 or so I have are feeding only on the ground. But the other five seem to like the feeder for some reason.