Here he is competing with the Goldfinches.

Enjoy.

With the relatively mild winters here, I don’t know if we’ll see them all winter long, but we’ll keep an eye out.  This little guy was content to stop for a quick sip and perch on our feeder for a rest.  Here’s a few seconds of video showing him at work.

Enjoy!

Now I love woodpeckers, and from our experiences at our old house, these two sure looked like Northern Flickers (Colaptes auratus) though I didn’t see any red shafting, though that must be what they are. Judging by their size, I’d guess that they are both female rather than juvenile males.

These two kept at it quite a few minutes. An SUV happened by and they scattered only to return a few minutes later. Here is a decent snap of one:

I captured a few minutes of their antics but they both appear to be either juvenile males, females or a perhaps a combination. Seems odd for any kind of mating ritual in the fall, but apparently this activity and its apparent gender indifference is not uncommon. This was news to us and still exciting to see.

So for your viewing enjoyment, here are a few minutes of their dance. Enjoy!

As we got further into birding, we inevitably wanted to save some of our experiences and share them with others. But when we looked at the beautiful images in the bird books and even the beautiful close up views our old modest binoculars provided, we thought we’d never be able to capture anything like it without a significant outlay of cash for photography equipment.

Being somewhat old school, big beautiful bright close ups of flittering birds meant only one thing to us: Big expensive telefoto lenses. Wrong we were. A little technology and some cleverness came to the rescue. Enter digiscoping.

Simply take a digital camera and aim it through your favorite optics and voila! You’re digiscoping. The results were pretty impressive considering the meager inputs. Most of the snap shots on our old West Seattle Birdcam blog were shot this way and so were the recent videos on this blog.

I had recently purchased a small Canon PowerShot SD1000 digital camera (about the size of a pack of cards) and just held the lens up to my binoculars. The PowerShot SD1000 has a 3x optical zoom, so when combined with your typical pair of 7x35mm binoculars, you get a magnification of 21 times. A ginormous effective focal length and all by only combining your already existing equipment.  More than enough for backyard birding and great for hikes.

Many folks have setups with tripods, spotting scopes and handy brackets to hold your digital camera over the eyepiece, but to get started all you really need is a monocular or pair of binoculars and a digital camera. It takes two hands– better if they are steady hands– but you will be astounded by what you can achieve.

So far, my cheapo digiscoping high water mark was during our trip to Joshua Tree last spring. We were lucky enough to stumble on a Bighorn Sheep while hiking. All I had was the PowerShot and a pair of compact Nikon binoculars. Still I was able to get these shots from about 150 yards away.

All told, the camera and the binoculars must have weighed only about a pound and both fit nicely into a jacket pocket.  There are lots of tips about how to digiscope, so I encourage you to search for tips and read through the links above, but above all just try it and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Enjoy!

This morning seems to have changed all that. A few Juncos have been regulars and one or two very skittish house finches, as well as plenty of passersby but not much more than that. Just this morning though, I caught a slight flash of color and notices a rather dingy somewhat gold bird in the tree near the thistle feeder. It looked like a female American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis) but it was a little hard to tell in the foliage and then she was gone.

Not more than a few minutes later though, the unmistakable male happened by and stayed for quite a while on the thistle feeder. He seemed to be the first one to realize that the feeder was there because it was only after he had visited that other finches started to feed there as well. Its great to see a diversity of visitors so quickly discover our yard.

Here he is enjoying breakfast.

And here he is with the house finch and female goldfinch.

Enjoy!

Another first, I’ll be trying to post some video clips from time to time as well as snap shots and hopefully get the motion sensor feedercam back up soon. As with everything birdcam, its all experimental, so expect constant changes and (hopefully) improvements (like a tripod or less caffeine!) over time.

Enjoy!