About a week and a half ago, I decided to lay out
some wild bird seed on my back deck (in two seed trays I bought at
the hardware store), just to see if I could attract any songbirds at
all. I don't have any trees in my backyard or really anywhere close
for that matter, as I don't live in the typical urban neighborhood
with big tall trees and neighbors close by with a small backyard. I
figured that since I have a huge, open backyard with my neighbors
spaced out that it might be more difficult to attract songbirds. It
took about a week before I noticed the first bird feeding off the
seed I laid out on the deck. I went with the seed tray on the deck
rail route because I don't have a squirrel problem around my house
(for the reasons I mentioned above -- no trees!). I wasn't sure
which species was visiting my feeding station because every time I
got a glimpse of the bird, it would take off. The deck rail is
actually quite close to my back porch door.
So when I got off work this morning, I got the
brilliant idea to set up the camera (Nikon D3) on a tripod (I have
to use my 80-400mm lens, because the distance from my back door to
the seed trays is less than the minimum focusing distance of the
600mm lens!) and put it in interval timer shooting mode. This is
the first time I've tried this to try to capture the birds, so I
pre-focused the D3 on one of the seed trays and used 80mm focal
length so I could get a better idea of the bird behavior around the
seed tray. I set it up to start at 8:20am, firing every 20 seconds
for 200 total shots. This would span a little over an hour's time.
Once I got it all set up, I went to bed (I just got off my 10pm to
6am mid shift). When I woke up I took a look at the images, and I
was very pleasantly surprised to see two House Finches -- one male
and one female.
Now that this next step was a success, it was time
to move on to the next step, which was to create landing perches for
the birds above the seed trays so I could photograph the birds
without having evidence of feeders in the shot. I went to the
hardware store and bought some additional supplies to accomplish
this, as well as perusing the local creek to find some dead fall
branches to set up above the feed. So now the next minor goal is to
get a good zoomed in shot of one of the finches, or other common
backyard song bird, perched on one of the branches I set up above
the seed trays. I will try to perfect this setup over the next
couple of months during the winter season. My ultimate long-term
goal is to create a songbird photography setup in my backyard (where
I had my vegetable garden the past two seasons) and get some amazing
bird images with the 600mm lens.
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