Tuesday, March 17, 2009
Birds and Glass Doors
Birds and Glass Doors don't get along very well. In fact, despite all the complaints you hear about windmills eating birds, more birds die annually from collisions with glass patio doors than they do from encounters with windmills (try this Google search).
On Sunday, one of the girl house finches that lives near my yard (and frequents my feeders) hit the door to my deck. [Edit: no, that's not a house finch. It's the Canadian cousin of the Gold Finch that's been hanging around here lately due to lack of food in Canada from the droughts last year. Don't remember it's name. I'll ask again at Wild Birds and post back. Given how colorful the Canadian finches aren't, it may even be a boy.] Hard. So hard that I expected to see her dead when I looked outside. But she wasn't dead — she was just stunned. Really stunned. So I scooped her up and set her on my table and got my camera and took some pictures with the macro extension. The light was lousy, but the results were still pretty good. I shot these at 400 ISO at about f6.3 — that was the best aperture I could manage with the lousy light. Getting really close to something with a macro means significant depth of field is needed to keep the subject in focus, so that why the focal plane seems so narrow.
Here's a close up of her eye; you can see the lattice pattern of the table reflected in the lower part of her iris:
Another close up, of her beak, with a lot of perspective:
Here's a close up of her tail feathers; on the full image, you can see a lot of detail:
The story ends well, too. We were going to put her in a rag-lined pot so she'd stay warm, but before we could move her, she flew away and landed on a tree near the back of my yard.
P.S. The long hiatus was due mostly to being busy, but also to having little that wasn't mundane to talk to about. Seemed better to be silent than post boring stuff.
On Sunday, one of the girl house finches that lives near my yard (and frequents my feeders) hit the door to my deck. [Edit: no, that's not a house finch. It's the Canadian cousin of the Gold Finch that's been hanging around here lately due to lack of food in Canada from the droughts last year. Don't remember it's name. I'll ask again at Wild Birds and post back. Given how colorful the Canadian finches aren't, it may even be a boy.] Hard. So hard that I expected to see her dead when I looked outside. But she wasn't dead — she was just stunned. Really stunned. So I scooped her up and set her on my table and got my camera and took some pictures with the macro extension. The light was lousy, but the results were still pretty good. I shot these at 400 ISO at about f6.3 — that was the best aperture I could manage with the lousy light. Getting really close to something with a macro means significant depth of field is needed to keep the subject in focus, so that why the focal plane seems so narrow.
Here's a close up of her eye; you can see the lattice pattern of the table reflected in the lower part of her iris:
Another close up, of her beak, with a lot of perspective:
Here's a close up of her tail feathers; on the full image, you can see a lot of detail:
The story ends well, too. We were going to put her in a rag-lined pot so she'd stay warm, but before we could move her, she flew away and landed on a tree near the back of my yard.
P.S. The long hiatus was due mostly to being busy, but also to having little that wasn't mundane to talk to about. Seemed better to be silent than post boring stuff.
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