Boolie’s Blog

This year I focused on photographing one of my favorite parts of the spring, the singing of the songbirds. I was fortunate enough this year to get some nice singing pictures of yellow-headed blackbirds, red-winged blackbirds, song sparrows, savannah sparrows, and marsh wrens.

One trick was to find a location where the birds often visited and that had a background that I liked, then to wait (and wait and wait) to get lucky enough to get the right pose in the right light. My cameras are a few generations old and don’t have enough burst depth to capture the whole song, so by watching the birds for a while I learned the right part of the song to start shooting and capture their most expressive pose — the hard part was forcing myself to wait once the bird started to sing.

Even then I wasn’t guaranteed a good picture. Birds have a semi-transparent nictitating membrane (like a third eyelid) that they can sweep back from the front of their eye to either clean or protect the eye. On a windy day, you’re much more likely to accidentally photograph it as the birds protect themselves from flying debris. This can either cause the eye to look cloudy or even reflect the surroundings such as a blue sky, making the birds look otherwordly.

It all happens so fast that you won’t realize it’s happened until you look at the picture. An SLR camera has a brief blackout period when the mirror flips up to expose the sensor, and what looked like a perfect picture when you tripped the shutter might not be so perfect after all.

Wind causes other problems, especially for birds like this marsh wren that are perched on flimsy plants. The wind can blow them out of frame or at least out of focus, and will certainly change the background you’ve carefully selected.

A singing marsh wren presents one other problem — they often close their eyes near the peak of their song. Fortunately I do have enough burst depth on my camera to take a handful of pictures pretty quickly, so even though the little wren shut its eyes in this picture, I still came home with a handful of lovely pictures.

Another close-up of a male yellow-headed blackbird. I haven’t been out hiking for the last month and have been a bit worn out from working extra hours at work, but editing this picture brought back the fun of seeing the blackbirds return this spring.

Marsh wrens serve a vital role in sloughs across the Pacific Northwest, acting as fences of shoddy or stolen merchandise. Be on your guard should one spot you, as it’s hard to resist their low, low prices!

One nice thing about this view of a preening marsh wren is that you can see the little white arrows that shoot down the dark patch at the top of its back, my favorite aspect of their plumage.

This is the same swallow as the one in the previous picture, as you can see from this picture he really isn’t as chubby as he appeared. He also might have had a little damage to his left wing, but it didn’t appear to impact his flight.

In the air, swallows have a sleek, aerodynamic shape designed for close maneuvering so they can catch insects in flight. You’d never know it from looking at this little puffball, with his feathers puffed out he gives a false impression of being rather plump. Many birds will do this when they are cold to create pockets of warm air, much like a hiker dressing in layers.