Finches and a Wren ahopping

Whose heart doesn't dance at the sight of a feisty crowd of frolicking, feeding birds! I was taking a break yesterday from writing a community-watch newsletter when I happened to look out into the back yard. I had to set up my digiscoping equipment right then and there (even if I don't get the best results taking photographs through two panes of glass).

Click to enlarge photos, none of which has been retouched

Then Carolyn thought she saw "our Woodpecker" on a tree directly behind the feeders. I took many but none was focused. Either the double-paned glass really played havoc at 200+ feet or my camera was focusing on the wrong thing amongst all the branches.

Thursday morning's backyard birds

My wife thought she had spotted a Downy Woodpecker on our woodpecker feeder (later she allowed that it might have been a Hairy), so I set up my digiscoping equipment and waited.

When I saw a bird alight on the woodpecker feeder, I managed to repositioin and get two shots before it flew off. My wife looked at them and didn't think it was the Downy (or the Hairy) Woodpecker she'd spotted earlier:

Here's our array of feeders:

Peck on wood

I used a different strategy today (from my last outing—not reported here—when I moved my setup several times trying without success to get a photograph of the elusive woodpecker, who moved from one spot to another so quickly I couldn't react in time). This time I set up my digiscoping equipment and sat down in an unfolding chair to wait patiently until a woodpecker might show up.

First photo

Second photo, taken seconds later;
the last I saw him for today

    My setup consisted of a Nikon ED50 fieldscope, a Nikon camera attachment FSB-U1, and a Nikon Coolpix P300 camera. It was about ninety feet from the tree, and the woodpecker was about fifty feet up.

Thanks to my wife for some identification:

The woodpecker is a juvenile red-headed woodpecker, a threatened species. When I first saw the bird some months ago, I thought it was a juvenile red-head but I couldn't be sure until I saw these photos. A mature red-headed woodpecker doesn't have the black bars among the white feathers, and the head is even redder. Notice how this guy has some black showing in his red head. Check out the photos on this Red-Headed Wookpeckers page for comparison.

Pileated1 Woodpecker sighting!

We didn't take the picture, alas, but we did see a Pileated Woodpecker this morning, forty or so feet up in a tree perhaps seventy-five yards from our back door. Through our fieldscope.
    Let this finally move us to go ahead and purchase the Nikon Coolpix P300 and accessories for attaching it to our scope for digiscoping (digital photography through a fieldscope). It's even on sale right now from Nikon (but Amazon's price is still $50 less, with no shipping charges).
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1. pi·le·at·ed adj: having a crest covering the pileum [the top of the head of a bird from the bill to the nape]

Digiscoping

Cropped version of yesterday's photo

The photo yesterday of "Young Blue Bird testing happiness" got our juices flowing for improving our setup for digiscoping, which is digital photography aided with a fieldscope.
    Yesterday's photo was made without a wide-angle eyepiece or an adapter to hold the camera in place. My wife just held her Coolpix P100 against the fieldscope eyepiece, where her eye would otherwise be, and shot.
    The vignetting (fading to black at the periphery) is the tip-off. I could have cropped (as I did for today's version, above) but didn't. I assume that the photo below (borrowed from Alastair Rae) was cropped, because he says that the photo, his "all-time favourite bird shot..., was taken by just hand-holding a Coolpix 995 directly to the telescope eyepiece."

Nesting Black Woodpeckers

It's such a better photo than either my wife or I have been able to take so far. Here's one I took last December:

Sorry, I hope my wife will be able to identify the birds for us
(I cropped this photo to achieve the "Alastair Rae look")

But maybe we haven't worked hard enough at it yet? Rae says that he's "been playing about with the painful art of digiscoping birds for a few years now," and he has "tried a variety of cameras and adapters."
    Here are a few more digiscoped photos, borrowed from Digiscoped.com:

Green Woodpecker

Green Woodpecker

Kestral

Eurasian Blackbird (?)

Eurasian Blackbird

Here's a digiscoping setup, with an adapter to hold the camera to the eyepiece of the fieldscope:

Looks like a Nikon ED82

Isn't this fun!