eBirdseed.com Wild Bird Feeding Blog

One of the local, sure-fire indicators that spring is making her comeback is a one-day deluge of robins and starlings. Last year I tried to photograph the robins, but botched the job by failing to zoom the Olympus. (Great surprise aye?) This year, I made a determined effort to improve the situation by setting up the NovaBird remote, motion-activated camera at the first murmer of a murmuration of starlings*. The pictures below reflect the effort...

And a nice shot of a single starling came out as well...

In general, we're finally getting used to the cameras. Issues of focal length, camera angle, lighting, etc. are starting to make a bit more sense. And processes like manually adjusting the Olympus' aperture and shutter speed aren't nearly as unimaginable as they once were. It just takes time working with the manuals and the Internet, and then fussing with the cameras themselves. (The next challenge is setting the cameras back to the factory defaults. As it turns out, they were pretty good to begin with.)

Also, just a reminder that we try to load all respectable pictures onto our Flickr library site. Many if not most are available in very high resolution. (Just be forewarned that high res pictures take a considerable amount of time to load.) For example, if you'd like to see the photo above in a larger format, click here and then click on the "All Sizes" icon inside of Flickr.

Onward...

Now about those contests... So far, only a handful of people have taken a shot at the following...

• The "eBirdseed.com Encryption Contest" complete with the hints. The winner of this one gets some home-made chowder and a signed photo of me standing on a mud flat wearing a mouseketeer hat.
• And the mystery-prize "New-York Style Pizza Contest"....

Better wrap this one up gang... Getting late.

And take heart - according to the starlings, winter is almost over.

See you by the feeders,

CapeCodAlan

* No, I didn't know that a group of starlings was called a murmuration. See http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/about/faqs/animals/names.htm.