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Feeding birds


Sagitar
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I had a birthday last Saturday and my big present was a new long-focus zoom lens for my Fuji.

 

I've been waiting for a chance to try it, but the weather has been so cold and miserable that I have had no chance.

 

Yesterday I got desperate and set up the camera on a tripod indoors and shot (through the dining room window) some pics of the birds feeding.

 

First this very handsome Goldfinch

 

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Then this scruffy little Coal tit youngster - still growing adult plumage.

 

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And finally this adult Great tit, just ready to fly off with a sunflower kernel.

 

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Happy birthday for last week :)

 

Some great photos there, love the colours of the Goldfinch. I keep meaning to try and take photos of the ones in our garden. Unfortunately we also get alot of squirrels and pigeons who scare them away.

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Sorry to has missed the birthday?....... Absolutely crystal images which i put down to the new lens but the caricature in the images is all your work and you can't buy that.... Look at the first picture the birds even looking at you almost posing. 

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After the miserable weather recently, it was good to see the sun today and to be able to get out into the garden and give the camera a go in the fresh air.

 

The head gardener

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Escholsias (and others)

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Goldfinch (at the top of the tree)

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Male Blackbird (trying to hide?)

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and his missus telling him off

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Great photos as usual :)

 

What bird feeder do you use, just a normal wooden table? I would love to have one of those as they make for a better background but there is no way of stopping the squirrels and probably even rats climbing up it.

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Great photos as usual :)

 

What bird feeder do you use, just a normal wooden table? I would love to have one of those as they make for a better background but there is no way of stopping the squirrels and probably even rats climbing up it.

We have a traditional bird table and we hang feeders on the outside of it. We don't have any problems with squirrels or rats. Wood pigeons can be a nuisance but I've nailed wires in place so that only small birds can get in.

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Having the woods behind our garden doesn't help, I'll probably just have to put up with them but we use the feeders with cages around them now, they broke the ones that you have. Neighbours have been leaving monkey nuts out recently, which the squirrels keep bringing into our garden and dropping on the grass, which then attracts the rats from the woods! :(

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Have a word with next door then.... A polite one.

 

I don't know who is leaving them out, the woods back on to half the road so they could be bringing them from anywhere.

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We have a pair of Blackbirds with a brood on a nest in the garden and they are busy collecting food.

 

I put down some dried meal worms to help them a bit, but he didn't seem very interested. I think he's a bit of a poser.

 

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But his missus couldn't wait to stuff her beak full.

 

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She flew into a tree away from the nest and sat there for a while before heading for the nest. Some kind of distraction behaviour I assume.

 

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She seems less timid than the male and will approach quite closely to get at food.

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How far away from the bird table and trees are you and how much do you crop them by afterwards?

 

I can see from your exif data they were taken at 400mm so I'm assuming your new lens is the 100-400? I have just got the Tamron 70-300 so it's a little shorter at the long end.

 

I had a go at photographing the birds in my garden yesterday but I was on the patio and the feeder is about 10-12 metres away. There is a family of blue tits that are nesting in a tree in the woods and they fly down to the feeders. They are really difficult to get into focus but after cropping the birds out of the background they didn't look that great :( I think I need to move closer to the feeders.

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You're right Rich; the lens is a 100-400mm zoom. Of course there are complications. There is a 1.4x multiplier adapter with it that takes the maximum focal length to 560mm and on the XT1 there is a sensor factor of 1.5 that gives a field of view equal to that on a 840mm lens on full frame. The lens sharpness is maximised at about f8. It starts to soften round the edges at bigger apertures and at smaller apertures, lens diffraction reduces sharpness. So I'm trying to work at f8 by adjusting the ISO value. The lens has very good image stabilisation so I can work at slower speed than you might expect with such a long lens, but of course it doesn't stop subject movement.

 

I haven't got the data to answer your question about distances, but next time I'm outside I'll do some manual focusing and note the distances.  I have a seat on the terrace and I would guess that it is not more than about five metres from the bird table. I can fill the frame with a small bird at this sort of distance. I sometimes lose focus when birds walk onto the terrace because the closest focus distance is (I think) 1.7 metres.

 

I'm very impressed with the resolving power of the lens, but it does need the right light with appropriate levels of contrast. If you get it right you can crop hard without losing too much sharpness.

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Rich - I took a few pics for you to look. Not easy because it kept raining. The birdtable pics and those of birds on the ground are at about 8m from the camera. The poppys are at about 10m. The sky photos are anyone guess. But non are cropped. I'm going to try to load them in PSD format, but I may fail. Here goes:-

 

 

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Thanks for the info above Sagitar. I had another play last week when it was sunny and sat near the fence about 5 metres away for about 90 minutes and took several shots, the missus thinks I'm sad!  :rolleyes: It was a clear sky, sunny and bright but I still struggled a little although did manage to get a few decent shots, I've not sorted them out yet though.

 

If you were trying to upload the files directly to the forum then it won't accept PSD ones :(

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  • 2 weeks later...

We had a couple of finches (a chaffinch and a greenfinch) sharing the feeder amicably yesterday. It used to be unusual to see a chaffinch on a perching feeder but they seem to have learned the skills recently.  The odd green colour below the chaffinch is just the light reflected from the grass below.

 

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Today we had a pair of collared doves perching on the roof of the bird table and billing and cooing in the rain.

 

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At the same time there was a young blackbird taking advantage of the soft ground to hone his digging skills. The remains of his "gape" are still visible so he's not long off the nest and he looks a bit odd with the mixture of immature and adult plumage that he is carrying.  The development of young birds adds a lot of interest to bird watching at this time of the year.

 

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