Upcoming Digiscoping Workshop

Hey, any people from my hometown in Indianapolis free on Sunday, March 29, 2009? I'm doing a digiscoping workshop at Eagle Creek Park right after the Sunday morning bird walk!

The bird walk starts at 9am (there's a fee to enter the park, but the walk and digiscoping workshop are free) and then I'll do a brief powerpoint showing my photos (the good, the bad, the downright weird). The workshop will most likely start at 11:30am (or when the walk is finished). I'll show you how to do digiscoping, help you where I can with your equipment and afterward, we'll put it to practice. Bring your equipment or if you don't have it yet, but you are thinking of getting started, bring your digital camera or your scope and we'll look them over and see what would work best for you.

Digiscoping is a fun way to get souvenier photos of birds at the feeder or on bird walks!

Friday Morning

I got totally punk'd by my alarm on Friday morning. I was supposed to be at the San Diego Bird Festival headquarters by 5:30 to film a couple of morning live shots for KUSI with Karen Straus. My iPod alarm went off at 4:30 am, I gradually woke up, brushed my teeth and opened my laptop to check the weather. The laptop read 2:38am. I thought that was odd. I checked my hotel room clock and it read 2:36am. It was then that I realized that my iPod was still on Minneapolis time and not San Diego time.

Karen and I did a few segments with weatherman Joe Lizura--he and his camera man were a hoot. I think we may have startled them and they were afraid we would say "I'm here to see a pair of brown boobies!" on air, but we kept it mild. I even managed to video a couple of minutes of Joe interviewing us live (and demonstrate digiscoping). I stop just as he's about to ask me about the World Series of Birding:



Here's an actual digiscoped photo of the black-crowned night heron right outside the festival vendor area:

Finca El Pilar Birding In Guatemala

Don't forget, there's still time to vote for your favorite guest blog entry!

So, what the heck was I doing in Central America? I was part of the Fifth International Birdwatching Encounter in Guatemala. It was group that included bird guides and bloggers from Japan, Denmark, the US, and even Ecuador. One of the participants was Rick Wright of WINGS Birding Tours and I felt like I got some kind of great deal because he's a walking field guide. What a treat to have his bird knowledge along. He really is a birder's birder, we were talking popular culture and he didn't know what a Cosmo Quiz was. You want to be out in the field with a guy who has his head filled with the finer nuances of empidonax flycatchers as opposed to "What Kind Of Sexy Are You?"

Where do I begin with my Guatemala adventure? I think with volcanoes. This was the first time I had ever been to a place so chock full of volcanoes. Let's face it, this was the first time I'd been out of the country (at least to the point where a passport was required). The whole time, I kept looking around and asking myself, "How the heck did I get here?"

Our first day of birding was at Finca El Pilar, a private shade grown coffee farm being converted into a nature reserve. We went above the coffee farm to get some of the local specialties and incredible views of the surrounding volcanoes. We birded a few days here so I'll have lots to tell you.

Some of the volcanoes that we encountered during our visit, like Fuego are active and you can see little puffs of smoke coming off the top all day long. I digiscoped some of Fuego's smoke above. How can you not feel like you're not on an adventure if you're surrounded by active volcanoes?

I was expecting a complete and total sensory overload when it came to the birds, but was incredibly surprised by the number of familiar faces down there, like this eastern bluebird. It had a bit of a different accent than the eastern bluebirds I hear up in Minnesota and one of the guides mentioned that it was a more local variety, down to having a duller look than the bluebirds I'm used to. Still, the first few days, their calls really tripped me up.

When I wasn't seeing species I could see at home, I was at least seeing species similar to what I can see at home. There were all kinds of crazy looking thrushes, check out this pair of rufous-collared robins (be prepared for rufous to show up a lot in species names, whoever named the birds in Central America really liked that in their names). It's a highland thrush and looks similar to robins we see in the US.

Another somewhat familiar bird was the black-headed siskin, here's a pair above. While the siskin irruption still rages in the US, I was still able to see some siskins at El Pilar.

Check out this rufous-collared sparrow (there's that rufous again). It's a great looking bird, reminiscent of a white-throated sparrow. These birds were seen all over. Speaking sparrows we did see some introduced species like house sparrows and rock pigeons, but this was the first birding trip that I ever been on where I did not encounter one single starling. No starlings here...can you imagine? Ten days and not seeing a starling--crazy!

While we were doing all this birding, I at one point could have sworn I heard several bees buzzing. I looked and could not see any hives nearby. I started to wonder if elevation sickness was closing in or if my tinnitus had switched from its usual high pitched ring to buzzing. Then I noticed a small water basin and took a peak...

There they were, a small swarm of honeybees gathering water for the hive. You sometimes can get honeybees coming to birdbaths or ponds when it's try, water is necessary for comb construction. I asked the owner of El Pilar and he said that he did not keep bees, but perhaps they were his neighbor's bees. Or they very well could have been from a wild hive. It was fun to hear that familiar buzzing.

We found a camper while above the coffee farm and I got a giggle at the Ron Paul sticker on the back. I didn't know anyone in Guatemala would be pro Ron Paul?

And now it is time for me to head into the Park Service. More on Finca El Pilar and Guatemala later.

And don't forget to vote for your favorite guest blog entry!

Digiscoping Challenges

Hello blog readers! Or should I say hola lectores del blog? I am back from my Guatemala birding adventure and am sorting through photos. I want to thank everyone who entered the guest blogging contest. There were many fantastic blog entries and I'm sorry that we couldn't post them all. Be sure to check out the voting for the top ten and select the entry you liked best (I'm having readers decide because Non Birding Bill and I had a tough enough time picking the top ten, let alone the best of all 53 entries).

I had a great time and learned something very interesting while birding in Central America: digiscoping is really hard! I'm pretty good at digiscoping, I'm fortunate to be able to do it often and I'm very familiar with my equipment. I can set up the shot and get my camera on the right settings without really thinking about it. I'm also very familiar with North American birds, I can sometimes predict how they will move on a perch to get a shot.

It was not the same in Guatemala, I had all new vegetation to figure out and the birds moved in different ways.

When I give digiscoping workshops, one of the things I hear the most is how someone can't get their equipment to work--usually because they've taken (at most) 20 photos that all turned out crappy and they don't understand why. You have to take dozens, if not hundreds of photos to get one decent shot. The more you work with your equipment, the more prepared you will be when a bird shows up and in the "perfect" pose. I've helped out at enough optics booths to know that many people buy their scope and digiscoping equipment right before they leave for a trip of a lifetime, barely enough time to get familiar with their equipment. If I had a tough time, how could someone with new equipment possibly get anything good going to a new area, with new birds, and not know how to work the camera and scope?

So, here are some conclusions that I came to while birding in Guatemala:

First, I had to pick my battles. I figured out quickly that I was going to be in sensory overload being around so many new species. The group we were with was very much a listing group, not so much a photography look. We'd try like the dickens to see certain species, but not really try for photos. So, when a cool ass bird like a pink-headed warbler was found, I needed to decide, "Do I want to try and aim the scope on a warbler, quite possibly missing it completely or do I want to really savor and watch this amazingly colorful warbler?" With most new species, I chose to watch the bird instead of trying to digiscope it. I did go for the pink headed warbler after a minute and the best I got was the above photo. You can see part of its head and vent from behind a leaf in the above photo.

Second, the lighting conditions in the neotropics were rather crappy. In the forest canopy, it's shady and many birds had a knack for perching with the sun directly behind them. Add incredibly tall trees and precarious scope angles and you end up with a blurry shot of a collared trogon (above).

However, there were many times when birds perched nearby, the lighting was not too bad and I could get that great shot of a berylline hummingbird--right down to its little white socks. So, I didn't get photos of every single bird (or even very good ones) but I do have some great stories and amazing birds to share.

The Furious Pack

I'm furiously packing and trying to tie up some details before I leave...did I mention I'm going to Guatemala.

I was clearing out my camera and found a photo I took of a fox sparrow from last Friday. We have a small flock that is bound and determined to spend the winter in the Twin Cities at the Minnesota Valley National Wildlife Refuge. They are for sure taking advantage of the native plantings that drop seeds all winter, but I think a case could be argued for the feeding station as well. Perhaps that is giving them the extra edge to survive? I've counted at least three, but I suspect there are four total.

By the way, I have to thank all the helpful followers on Twitter. Yesterday I had a sore throat. I suspected on Sunday that I was coming down with a bug, so I started to swab my inner nostrils with Zicam. When I wrote a Tweet about remedies, replies poured in. I tried almost all of them from honey, cider vinegar, honey, no dairy, honey, chicken ginger soup, honey, tea, honey, Emergen-C, honey, scotch toddy, honey, etc that I think they all worked (and left me with a minor stomachache). Sore throat is gone. I'm mildly stuffy, but no fever like yesterday.

Thanks for all the tips.

Varied Thrush In The Twin Cities

There's so much birdy goodness on right now, I'm too distracted to blog. I am currently surrounded by an explosion of winter finches which I started calling Redpollapalooza and another reader calls Siskagogo. I'll have more photos of that later.

As a matter of fact...I have started this particular blog entry about five times, but keep getting distracted by the winter finch activity. Focus, Sharon, focus!

We have had an unusual bird show up near where I volunteer at The Raptor Center. A neighborhood full of crab apples and cherries that several flocks of robins have been feeding on. Mixed in with those robins is a bird called a varied thrush.

This is a bird that is typically found in Pacific Northwest--it's a common bird for Born Again Bird Watcher (it's on the homepage of his redesigned site). But every winter there are reports of them popping up all over the US. It seems we always have at east one in Minnesota, and since this one was so close to where I live, I took a jaunt out to see it.

When I first arrived the trees were full of birds like the cedar waxwing above. We also found redpolls and pine siskins and after waiting about a half hour, the varied thrush showed up.

While waiting, I got to meet Michael who started the Facebook Twin Cities Birding Group. He seems like a cool guy and certainly has the best groomed facial hair of any birder I have ever met (sorry, Kenn).

We did have a great moment with a UPS guy while watching the thrush. He pulled up to ask what we were looking at. I let him see the thrush through my scope--he was impressed. He then asked how much longer we were going to watch because he had to turn his truck in front of us and it might scare the bird. We told him that we appreciated that he asked, but we realized he had a job to do and could go ahead. He moved slowly in his turn and the thrush shifted its position in the tree, but stayed.

Thank you, random UPS man, for being so thoughtful to birders!