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Beautiful Birds of Prey

I want to share with you six images of six gorgeous birds of prey that I was lucky to photograph up close at the NatureVisions photography expo a few weekends ago.

The expo is a nicely organized collection of opportunities for people who want to learn about photography: There’s an all-day lecture on Friday by a respected nature photographer, followed by a large array of choices for shorter seminars on Saturday and Sunday, mixed in with chances to do some actual shooting. This year they offered a session where you could do flower photography, a chance to photograph macaws and other parrots (I wrote about that last week), and a session featuring birds of prey brought in for us to practice on.

There’s a wooded area right outside the performing-arts center where the expo took place, so the guy who provided the raptors, Deron Meador—more on him in a moment—would just bring a bird out of one of the cages and position it on a tree branch at the edge of the woods, giving us a nice natural backdrop for our images. (The birds were tethered, so they weren’t going anywhere.)

Deron had a whole bunch of cages with him, an incredible variety of raptors. Below are the ones I was able to photograph before I had to scoot off to an image-critique session I’d signed up for. First, an American kestrel, a small, colorful predator that you sometimes see on power lines along Pennsylvania roads:

Next, a barn owl, which impressed me with its big round face: Read more

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Photography Wisdom from NatureVisions

I learned so much at the NatureVisions photography expo in Virginia last weekend that I can’t imagine how I would summarize it here. But I thought it might be helpful to share just a sampling of the wisdom I heard from the photography pros who spoke. Some of the items on the list below represent a theme that I heard over and over throughout the weekend; others are just random interesting bits of information that jumped out at me.

Action is the holy grail. Nikhil Bahl talked about three kinds of wildlife images: portraits, the animal in its environment, and action shots. In some ways that represents a common progression in a photographer’s learning, and it’s certainly true for me: I’ve gotten to be pretty good at still portraits of birds sitting on branches (what Nikhil and other photographers refer to as “a bird on a stick”), but I have far fewer images that show the bird or other animal doing something.

Nikhil wasn’t dissing portraits: “Everyone should take these, and every time I have a chance to take a portrait, I do,” he said. “But I’m always looking for something else.” A hawk with a little bit of blood on its face, suggesting that it’s just eaten. A fox licking its chops. Those tell a story, and are more engaging than a simple portrait.

My pal Lee Anne, whom I met on a Costa Rica photography trip, has lots and lots of action photos of birds. And by “action photos,” I just mean that she’s good at capturing them doing something, whether it’s singing or jumping or eating or whatever. Here’s just one example of what I mean, an image she took of a brown thrasher in mid-hop:

By the way, you totally should follow Lee Anne on Instagram (she has 45 thousand followers!).

Good nature photography takes time and devotion. Many of the killer images I’ve seen of birds and other wildlife didn’t happen by chance—more often, the photographer spent a lot of time to get the shot. Joe Subolefsky, for example, Read more

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A Couple of St. Paul Island Birds

I’ve been looking through my photos from my trip to St. Paul Island this past July and picking out a few to work on. Here are two that I processed the other night.

First is a cute little seabird called a parakeet auklet:

I love his adorable blue webbed feet and the white streamer (“plume” is the more accurate term among birders). The thing at the back of his beak is thought to be part of the bird’s desalination system—seabirds drink seawater, but can’t tolerate the salt any better than you or I can, so they have internal mechanisms for removing and excreting it.

Auklets, like their cousins the puffins, are pelagic, meaning they spend most of their life at sea. They come back to land only in the summertime to mate, lay an egg or two, and raise their chicks. And the only place they’re found in the world is in the northern Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea. We saw three kinds of auklets on St. Paul Island: parakeet, least, and crested. There’s a fourth kind, called the rhinoceros auklet, which is larger and is sometimes considered a kind of puffin.

The other photo I worked on is of a shorebird called a ruddy turnstone, picking its way through the tundra vegetation on St. Paul:

This one is a female, I’m told; the male has more exaggerated color. The Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology—an excellent site for bird information—says “it almost looks like a calico cat.”

I had just seen ruddy turnstones on the New Jersey shore in May, so I was a little confused about what they were doing up in the Bering Sea in July. It turns out that they breed in the summer in the northern reaches of North America and come south to the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the U.S. in the winter—but, according to Cornell, “many nonbreeding birds also hang around the coastal shores in the lower 48 even in the summer.”

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Posted on by Tina Hay

A Dispatch of Sorts from the Bering Sea

I’m pretty pumped to see my name on the home page of NatureScapes, a really respected business that caters to nature photographers. I wrote an article for them about a little-known wildlife hotspot—St. Paul Island, Alaska—and the piece was published on Friday.

NatureScapes offers photography workshops, sells photography gear, and offers articles, discussion forums, and other resources for photographers. I first took a NatureScapes trip about a year and a half ago, a workshop in Costa Rica. (The trip apparently has become enormously popular; it’s sold out for 2018 and 2019, but I see that they have openings in 2020, for those of you who plan way far ahead….) I loved the experience, and I met several photographers I still keep in touch with. One of them is Lee Anne Haynes Russell, who lives in Tennessee, and who talked me into signing up for another NatureScapes trip: the one to St. Paul Island, in the Bering Sea.

The trip took place this past July. I went into it with a little skepticism, and ended up having a terrific time. And that’s in spite of chilly temperatures, fog, dorm-like accommodations, cafeteria food three times a day, delayed luggage, and delayed flights. Anyway, I write about it in the article that you can see here.

By the way, I kept a pretty detailed journal on the St. Paul Island trip, and I’m thinking about posting an abbreviated version of that journal here on my blog over the next couple of weeks. I realize that not everyone may find it interesting, but it might be a good reference for anyone who’s planning a trip to St. Paul and wants to get a feel for what the experience will be like.

 

Posted on by Tina Hay

Where the Wildlife is Big and Close

There’s a saying in photography that “it’s not about the camera.” A good way to make a photographer wince is to admire one of their images and then ask, “What kind of camera did you use?” The joke is that it’s like asking a chef after a fabulous meal, “What kind of pots and pans did you use?”

And yet, when it comes to wildlife photography, there’s some truth in the notion that you do need decent equipment. An iPhone or a point-and-shoot does a great job in lots of situations—travel photography, landscapes, people, and so on—but it’s probably not going to be enough to capture a quality image of, say, a bear 300 yards away. So those of us who are passionate about nature photography tend to spend a lot of money on gear: a high-end DSLR camera body (or two), big heavy lenses, a tripod, a sturdy gimbal head to support the tripod, padded cases to carry everything in, and so on.

A blue-and-gold macaw at Bird Kingdom.

But investing in expensive gear is not for everyone. And when I give a presentation about wildlife photography onboard Le Boreal next January as part of the Penn State Alumni Association’s Antarctic cruise, I want to be able to offer useful advice for people who want to take good wildlife photos with the camera they happen to have.

So I’ve been thinking about compiling a list of places you can go where the wildlife is relatively (1) big and (2) close. Because that’s where you’ll have the best chance at good images, regardless of what you’re shooting with.

I’d welcome your suggestions in this regard. Here’s what I’ve got so far: Read more

Posted on by Tina Hay · 1 Comment

You Might be a Bird Nerd If …

Each morning as I’m waking up, I try to remember the dreams I had the night before. Sometimes they’re nonsensical; sometimes they’re frightening. Sometimes they’re profound and poignant. Sometimes I try to puzzle a dream out and realize it’s my brain’s way of reassuring me about something: “Relax; you’ve got this.” And sometimes they’re just not loaded with much meaning.

A dream I seem to have every so often in that last category is that I’ve spotted some really cool and unusual bird, often right in my backyard. There’s not much more to the dream than that—other than the part where I wake up and realize that it didn’t actually happen, and/or that the bird doesn’t even exist in nature.

Last night I dreamed I was with a bunch of other photographers standing on a porch at some ecolodge, looking for a saffron toucanet—a beautiful bird in the same family as toucans, and one that I hope to see when I’m in Brazil next summer. And, sure enough, one landed on the railing directly in front of me. It was less than a foot away from me, looming over me, bigger than saffron toucanets are in real life. It was way too close to photograph, and besides, the sun was behind it, so it would have been a lousy shot all around. I just stood there, frozen, staring at it in amazement, and not wanting to move for fear of scaring it off. Other people were getting good photos—and laughing at my predicament.

Eventually the toucanet moved, and by then there were a lot of interesting birds lining the railings. But of course there was no memory card in my camera (as is always the case in dreams!), so I had to root around and find one.

And that’s all I remember.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly profound about this dream. No moral to the story—sorry! Mostly it just goes to show how geeky I am about birds, that I would dream at night about seeing them.

The photo you see above is of a real saffron toucanet, and it was taken by my friend JoAnne Fillatti when she went on the same Glenn Bartley trip to Brazil that I’ll be doing next summer. I really hope I’ll see a saffron toucanet, and I hope I can get an image half as good as JoAnne’s. A lovely bird and a beautiful image, wouldn’t you agree? Click on it to see it larger.

Posted on by Tina Hay

Some Close-Ups from Yesterday’s Bird Banding

I think the reason I enjoy attending a bird-banding session—and I bet this is true for any visitor who stops by—is that it’s a rare chance to see birds very close-up. They’re not a distant speck in your binoculars or your camera lens. They’re also not hopping or flying around from branch to branch, flitting in and out of view. They’re right in front of you, holding more or less still, in the gentle grip of some volunteer who’s weighing and measuring them and examining them. You get to see tiny details on their face and beak and wings.

For a photographer, that close proximity also offers a chance to get some half-decent pictures of the birds. In fact, bird-banding volunteers usually know how to hold a bird in what’s called the “photographer’s grip,” which allows you to actually see and photograph more of the bird’s body than the “banding grip.”

About a half-dozen volunteers—mostly Penn State undergraduates—worked at yesterday’s banding session at the Arboretum at Penn State. They set up “mist nets” at various locations near the Overlook Pavilion and in the fields behind it, and over the course of the morning they snared 11 gray catbirds, two northern cardinals, two downy woodpeckers, two tufted titmice, two goldfinches, a house finch, and—the best bird of the morning—a Swainson’s thrush. Each bird got fitted with a metal band for tracking its migration, and the volunteers took measurements and assessed the bird’s age and sex. The data get combined with information from other bird-banders nationwide, as a way of understanding the overall health of the species’ population.

The volunteers, and bander-in-charge Nick Kerlin, are really accommodating of visitors—if a family with kids strolls by and shows interest, Nick will typically ask the kid if he’d like to release the bird. Kids are usually pretty excited to do that. Similarly, Nick and the volunteers are always nice about letting me take a few photos of the bird before they release it.

The cardinal at the top of the page was one of yesterday’s captures, as was the tufted titmouse above. (Titmice are feisty little birds that do not like to hold still for photos.) Below is Read more

Posted on by Tina Hay

Bird Portraits

If you want to get some extreme close-up portraits of wild birds, one place to go is to a local bird-banding session. I’ve written about bird banding over on The Penn Stater magazine’s blog (here and here, among other posts); it involves stringing up fine-mesh “mist nets” to capture wild birds, then extricating them, taking some measurements, and fitting them with a tiny metal leg band so that scientists can follow their migration patterns.

Locally, the banding takes place in the spring and the fall—during bird-migration season—at the Arboretum at Penn State, under the direction of Nick Kerlin, who’s licensed by the state and federal governments to do this. It’s a great opportunity for Penn State wildlife and fisheries science majors to get experience in the process—and for a photographer, it’s a great opportunity to shoot portraits of the birds before they’re released again.

There’s a bird-banding session tomorrow morning at the Arboretum, and the weather looks good, so I’ve cancelled my Saturday-morning gym appointment (shhhhhhhh) and I plan to head over. You never know what birds might show up—earlier this season, they got a cuckoo (yellow-billed, I think, though both yellow-billed and black-billed are found in Pennsylvania in the summer). More commonly, it’s catbirds, chickadees, cardinals, titmice, and other fairly common birds. That’s a tufted titmouse I photographed last year at the top of the page, and the image below is of a song sparrow from a few years back.

If I get any good images tomorrow, I’ll post them here this weekend.