Revisited: Cheap Bird Photography and Bird ID
Hi all,
Just a quick post tonight with a couple of thoughts. The first has to do with cheap bird photography, and the second involves that tired old subject of bird identification.
It seems that bird photography has become somewhat of a sacred practice what with digiscopes, 12 mega-pixel cameras, and junkets to the Andes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've ranted about this before, but people still fuss and fret about taking bird pictures and the experts still obfuscate. So I'll rant about it now and probably rant about it again.... Look, given the proliferation of cheap digital cameras out there (including phone cams), everyone should be able to take a few avian pics. Hey, even if you just draw and label, you can still have fun and share the experience. Besides, how much worse can it get than the artwork in my "Beakly World News" report?
The last thing that deserves attention tonight is closely related to the issue above - that of bird ID. Yeah, the photo at the top of this post is awful. The wife took the usual tripod, and all I had was an old, short broken one we picked up for a dollar at a yard sale. So what?!? We still have enough info to identify the bird. Obviously, it's a woodpecker, and in these haunts, it's either a Downy or a Hairy. A Downy typically measures roughly 6", and a Hairy stretches the length to about 9". Since the suet cake is about 5" square, it looks like we're staring at the backside of a Downy. And we could have reached that same conclusion even if we just drew the bird.
I don't know... I think backyard birding (like so many things in life) has just become too complicated. So take some fuzzy shots of birds, or scrounge some old bird book and proudly proclaim that that is the bird that you saw. By my way of thinking, fishermen's' tales should pale to those of 'yard birders, and we've got the pictures to prove it.
See you by the feeders... (Did you see that? I know my pinhole camera got a snap, and my best friend's uncle's plumber swears it was a...)
CapeCodAlan
eBirdseed.com photo library
