In My Backyard

The onset of the coronavirus pandemic and its protracted continuation has forced many of us photographers to be flexible in what to photograph. Plans we had for the year likely got stymied, like a November trip I had planned for a year with photography friends to Death Valley in California. Several short trips in-state were put on the shelf, too, until I could feel safe enough to venture out. That meant getting creative about creativity for this past summer. And that, for me at least, became a silver lining that I’d even elevate to the term of “blessing in disguise”.

Like most everyone else, I began to stay at home – a lot. I worked from what I call my home “office” (a small room about as big as a converted closet). And for “recreation” I spent time on my patio in my backyard. It’s a pleasant enough backyard but hardly what I would have called a “nature preserve” given the entire property behind it is a sprawling car dealership composed primarily of asphalt and metal. It is only now that I realize that even a backyard taken for granted for many years can reveal some of nature’s hidden secrets - like birds.

Sure, I’ve noticed birds in my backyard before. They’re the feathered creatures that say, “Tweet, tweet” or even, “Chirp, chirp”. And I could tell a robin from a hawk but not much else. In fact, I don’t think I could have identified more than three species of birds – the two mentioned above and the sandhill cranes that I have photographed in the San Luis Valley many times. But that all changed this summer.

Nuthatch eating his normal way (upside down) at a suet feeder

It started with observing the suet feeder on a post on the patio. Since I was sitting there so much now, I began to really notice the various little creatures that frequented it and their subtle differences. I’d drag my camera out and take a photo and identify the bird later. Soon I could tell a chickadee from a nuthatch by both sound and visually. Although I used a good old-fashioned book of birds of the Rocky Mountains, I used two apps that really helped – Merlin for visual IDs and BirdNET for audio IDs. Both apps were developed by Cornell University’s School of Ornithology. In fact, I took that even one step further and registered for Cornell’s online course in basic bird identification. Not only was the course good but I got to brag all summer that I was enrolled in a course at Cornell University and so I was now an “Ivy Leaguer” (as was anyone else who paid the $30 registration fee).

Outside My Backyard

I became amazed at the variety of birds just in my backyard. In addition to chickadees and nuthatches, there were woodpeckers, flickers, juncos and others made regular appearances. Eventually I “ventured out” from the patio to a corner of my backyard that has a tall pine tree and discovered the siren calls of finches, finding and photographing one of my first prized possessions, an American Goldfinch.

American Goldfinch in its resplendent breeding colors perched in my backyard

And even that car dealership, although technically not in my backyard, was visible from it, including telephone poles and wires running throughout it. I’d check them frequently and indeed found a whole variety of species on those poles alone. Redtail hawks, starlings, and even a shrike (no, I had no idea what that was at the time!) among others visited, some regularly and some as cameos. Often times, like in the case of the shrike, I had no idea what the bird was so I’d take a photo, run in to the house, download the SD card, zoom in, get the Merlin app and then ID it. The thrill I got of every new species I discovered made me feel like I was an explorer discovering new lands.

The not so common shrike enjoying a telephone pole in my backyard

After a few weeks I was having so much fun doing this I decided to again - and I use this term loosely – “venture out”. I decided to go to a portion of the South Platte River a mere 2 ½ miles from my house designated as a park with trails and small lakes off the river. I knew it was known for bird varieties but in the past my usage of the park was limited to using the bicycle trail, an activity that although makes for a good cardio exercise it doesn’t really lend itself to making deep observations. Those mini-lakes harbor herons, egrets and killdeers, beautiful shorebirds that I photographed, as well as cormorants that I found so amusing I would sometimes just stop and observe them for extended lengths of time.

These cormorants seem to be having a lively “discussion”

It was at these lakes that I began to experiment with photographing birds in flight, something that requires a lot more skill than just photographing a bird sitting and posing for you on a perch. But the rewards are much greater since you are capturing a more majestic moment in time. I practiced and practiced the techniques of focusing, what lenses worked best, camera settings, and post-processing. I have literally hundreds if not a thousand or so absolutely terrible images of birds in flight that aren’t even recognizable as, well, birds in flight. But I studied the bad ones and reverse-engineered the images to see what I did wrong, making mental notes on how to correct it next time. And indeed, I eventually got better.

Canada jay in fight in the mountains of Colorado

I also learned that action shots of birds such as birds eating, walking, or interacting in some way are more interesting than a portrait so I began to look for those situations. I captured egrets eating fish and frogs, cormorants in deep “discussions” with each other, and even a killdeer seemingly “proposing” to another killdeer.

Killdeer gets on his knees to propose (at least I like to think that)

The Gulch

About this time, I realized I was likely sitting on another goldmine of bird activity a mere four blocks from my house that I could easily walk to every day. The area is a gulch that is a several block area loaded with trees and bushes, in other words a haven for birds. I didn’t really discover it until early August. By then the wildfire smoke was so thick I’d often cut my walk short due to poor air quality for visibility let alone breathing. But it did open up another world of bird species to me – blackbirds, blue jays, house finches, and one of my favorites, the adorable hummingbird.

Hummingbirds are adorable but not easy to photograph in flight

I became a bit obsessed with this location, mainly since it was so easy to access and there were almost always some birds to either photograph or just observe. I started photographing stationary birds for identification and then small birds in flight there. I became taunted by hummingbirds who seemingly taunted me to get a sharp image of them, no easy task. They would fly up out of bush, hover for a brief second, and then shoot right back down. They were a daily challenge and I often found myself mimicking Bill Murray in the movie Caddyshack verbally challenging the groundhog to appear. Any day I got one or more good shot of a hummingbird were considered a good photography day for me. I once caught two hummingbirds in flight staring at each other, surely the Audubon Society Photo of the Year, only to discover later it was embarrassingly out of focus.

CLUNKER ALERT! This would have been a great shot if only I had it in focus! Can’t win ‘em all, I guess.

Feedback

After about six weeks of photographing birds I became somewhat proud of myself and posted about 100 shots on Flickr for a bird photographer friend of mine to critique and provide feedback. He gave me two excellent pieces of advice: 1) Fill the frame with the bird; and 2) Wait for a better light than what most of my shots had. I took neither piece of advice, for different reasons.

First, about that light. My friend, being from the upper Midwest, likely didn’t experience the constant summer wildfires we face in Colorado. Stellar blue skies in late summer have been dwindling over the years as wildfires continually pop up each summer. This summer we had the worst one in our state’s history (it’s 2020, of course) and we saw the smoke a couple hundred miles away daily. Had I waited for better light I still wouldn’t have great light as I type this today, well into the fall.

My friend’s other suggestion to fill the frame was based on the fact that birders like a full-framed shot for identification purposes. Indeed, some of my shots use this technique but I decided early on that my first preference is to get an environmental shot, which is a photo that shows the bird somehow in its natural environment and even interacting with it somehow. Of course, that’s not always possible but when it happens it feels hitting a jackpot on the slots for me.

Female and male red-winged blackbird at home

What I Learned

Throughout this entire time, I enjoyed putting the camera down and just watching the birds for patterns – patterns in flight, behavior, etc. I began to recognize how the small and fast cedar waxwing can be rather easily photographed in flight because of their propensity to return right back to the branch they just flew off of. I observed that birds lean slightly forward before takeoff, some for the purpose of getting a “running start” and some for the purpose of “pooping” to lighten their load.

I learned that finches and cormorants seem to be welcoming species that rarely get upset by other species invading their territory. I saw a great blue heron literally “babysit” a pack of young cormorants that seemed to be an act of graciousness and I also saw another great blue heron “babysit” two juvenile egrets.

Looked to me that this Great Blue Heron was “babysitting” these young cormorants

I learned that crows and hawks really don’t like each other. I watched an incredible show one day of about five crows harassing a young hawk that was perched atop a church steeple until it finally flew off but upside down. Puzzled, I googled that behavior and learned that raptors like hawks occasionally fly upside down as a defensive maneuver to show and remind its predators it talons that could crush them in a millisecond if they came too close. A few minutes later I saw what I assumed to be the Mama Hawk return and then chase those crows away. Apparently crows talk big until the odds are less I their favor even though 2 against five still seemed unfair.

Crow chasing hawk but several other crows were in back and out of the picture

Another time I watched a crow “buzz” a perched hawk over and over yelling at it each time it got close. The hawk seemed to duck each time and, disgusted, finally flew off the perch in response.

This crow kept “buzzing” this hawk. Surprisingly, the hawk gave up the perch and flew away.

And although I saw egrets and great blue herons coexist so peacefully together, such was not the case once with a black-crowned night heron. An egret had been fishing quite successfully until the night heron came by, yelled very loudly at the egret to get out of there and indeed successfully got the egret to leave. I figured the night heron thought that was his territory and maybe it was, but the heron immediately flew away, as if he just wanted to make sure no one else occupied it.

This snowy egret was having a great old time fishing until…

…this black-capped night heron chased him away!

In one of my favorite interactions, also viewed from the comfort of my soft patio chair, I watched a magpie alight on a telephone wire about 6 inches away from an osprey that had perched himself atop the telephone pole. The magpie would ever so slowly inch his way closer and closer to the osprey only to finally cross a line unacceptable to the osprey who would snap at the magpie. The magpie would fly off only to return for another try. This happened several times and one time the magpie seemed almost comically to fall off the wire it was so startled. Eventually the osprey tired of the magpie and simply flew away, hopefully finding a more peaceful perch. I suspect the magpie smelled carcass meat left over on the osprey’s talons and simply wanted to see if the osprey would share, which it certainly expressed no interest in doing.

This magpie got too close and the osprey let him know it! Almost comical how the magpie jumped off the wire

Zen

So, this was a summer of learning, observing and, of course, photographing moments of Zen. A lovely experience, maybe even more so because it was not what I had anticipated. The more I learned about birds the better bird photographer I became, to say nothing of an exponential appreciation of my newfound feathered friends. To my new BFFs I say, “Let’s do it again next summer!”

Video

I put together a video of just birds in flight from this summer on YouTube that is set to some beautiful music I licensed. I hope you enjoy it, too!