Nest Building Begins

June 1st seems to be the day each year where the Tree Swallows really ramp up their nest building efforts and get nest construction well under way. This morning was no different. Neville's pond was alive with the chatter of swallows bringing small strands of grass to their nest boxes. It seems the male does most of the nest building, while the female perches near by and supervises the male. Every now and again she will enter the box and "fix" what the male as placed inside. Another reason i believe the female stays near the nest while the male goes for more grass is because other swallows are relentless in trying to take over any boxes left available.

By late next week most pairs will be sitting on eggs. However on Wednesday i placed 4 more boxes at a wetland near my house. This morning a pair of tree swallows and one pair of Black Caped Chickadees had moved in. These birds will be slightly behind the rest.

Getting The Shot

To get photos like the ones below it is very simple. You really only need three things. Tree Swallows, A nest box and patients. All i do to get the images below are simply attach sticks that are unique and interesting like this mossy one; onto the nest box. Or i place the sticks near the nest box. It depends on where the light is shining from and how my background looks. I attach the sticks using zip ties and sometimes screws if i plan on leaving the perch there for some time. Then i get my tripod set up and wait....and wait. You might be there two minutes before swallows are on the stick and other times it may take more then an hour. I find the best days are days with no wind and overcast. The duller days are much easier for getting your exposure right with the whites and the blues of the birds.

Heres what it looks like

Below are a few more photos from this morning. Spring has defintaly arrived!

About to get some grass for the nest

More to come!

Purple Sandpipers at Cape Spear

Over the weekend brad and i decided to check out the purple sandpipers that winter annually at Cape Spear. When we arrived the sun was just starting to rise so we waited on the icy rocks and tried to spot the flock being flushed from the large waves. After a few minutes we spotted them flying by, and slowly made our way down to the waters edge which was coated in ice created by the salt spray.

The waves are so unpredictable at the cape making it extremely dangerous to shoot there on even good summer days, so what we do to be safer is one of use goes close to the water to shoot while the other is making sure there are no large waves coming and also looking for other birds in the distance such as dovkies, Black gullimonts, Common Eider and long tail ducks all of which we did see!

Its risky but we are extremely cautious and are willing to do what we have to the get the shot. As you can see we got some memorable shots!

This winter hit hard dumping a lot of snow fast, resulting in the birds to move elsewhere for shelter hopefully soon we will have more to share, expect a post about some feeder set-ups we have been thinking of and maybe some eagle close ups?

 

Diving Duck Mission

One of the big advantages here on the island in the winter is that we have a large numbers of diving ducks that make their way to our local ponds. Upon first arrival they spend most of their time in the middle of the ponds/lakes way out of reach for any photos. As winter creeps in the ponds begin to freeze pushing them closer to shore. Once this happens their behaviour is much different. They quickly become more confident at the presence of humans and look for any hand outs of food.
At the beginning of this year we had hoped for a few days of very cold weather and no wind which would freeze up the ponds before the snow came. This would allow us to get some shots of the divers in calm water with beautiful reflections of the foliage around. Once the snow comes the reflects will change and you will end up with alot of white in your images. Below are some shots we've gotten so far this year

 Female Greater Scaup

 Female Greater Scaup

 Male Tuffed Duck

 Male Tuffed Duck

Male Greater Scaup,  this was taken recently after we had snow. See how the colors have changed in these two photos compared to the rest

 Male Tuffed duck

Common Mergansers have been eluding us for some time. This winter we are going to try and use decoys and all white clothes to hopefully blend in more with the snow. We will be sure to include some photos of when we do that!

Cape St.Marys Ecological Reserve!

As promised, Brad and I (Brendan) headed to Cape St.Marys for our annual spring trip to photograph some sea birds and horned larks. When we arrived at the cape (7:30) we got out of the car and it was similar to being in a wind tunnel.....WINDY! we had hoped for no rain or fog and lucky enough there was not any rain or fog but be had not planned on gale force winds... We had planned to use our Kiwk camo blinds and my Bluetooth speaker to photograph the Horned larks but we knew that the wind would simply blow our blinds away and with so much wind the larks probably couldn't hear the speaker anyways. But we did get a couple shots, not the quality we were hoping for but at least its something !

After we scraped the idea of photographing larks we headed over to bird rock which as you can see from the picture below is home to hundreds of nesting gannets for the next few months. The over cast day was the type of lighting we needed to get the exposures of the white birds just right.

 

 

              While at the cape we were able to see multiple birds of prey including many eagles, a peregrine falcon and what we believe to be a Gyrfalcon ! With such a concentration of nesting birds its easy to see why these raptors would hang around for an easy meal !

Me and brad have seen numerous pictures of gannets and their colonies but we tried to get something "different" and unique so we tried a lot of different angles.

Later this upcoming week we will do a video review on the tripod head, the Jobu Jr Gimbal head ! and maybe our Kwik camo blinds !