There are many ways to photograph birds and in this post I will share with you how I do it. Photographing birds is arguably the most difficult and at times the most frustrating photographic endeavor that requires patients and perseverance. Birds are always on the move, especially Warblers, but they also move into and out of extreme lighting conditions.
When I was living the the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, one of my yard birds were Acorn Woodpeckers. They are very social and collectively they search for acorns and use a tree to store them for the winter. The male below was right off my deck so I was able to get very close but he was in the shade and with a shutter speed of 1/1000s and an aperture of f/4.8 I needed to use an ISO1600, which is a little higher than I like but it was below my upper limit ISO2000 for the D800.
This year was great for rare spring migrants passing through the Reno Nevada area. The birds in this blog I had photographed all less than an hour from my home below Mt Rose SW of Reno, Nevada. I used the ebird.org database to establish how rare the birds where based on the number of reports over the last 20 years.
2019 was a great year and I had more than normal favorites photos. The first favorite came 2 days into 2019 when I captured a Ferruginous Hawk taking flight and the last one was taken on 12-20 during the Fallon Christmas Bird Count (CBC) of a Western Meadowlark signing and I really like the bluish bokeh. The Ferruginous was perched on a power pole and I immediately pulled over.
Another all day outing was to the Patagonia area with the first stop being to Patagonia State Park. One of my favorite birds from the trip were the Pyrrhuloxia. I saw one briefly on the first day but when I was at the Canoa Ranch Conservation Park I heard an unfamiliar call so I started to track it down.
