WELCOME TO BIRDING
By Eric Joseph
Wildlife photography was one of my initial interests in digital photography. In those early days, I was limited with what I could do with a four megapixel point and shoot camera. But over the years I eventually ended up using a Nikon 70-300mm lens which was great while living in Colorado, but longer lenses were financially as well as focally out of reach.
In the the time since Colorado, I’d sometimes rent the Canon or Fujifilm version of the 100-400 if I had a specific wildlife photo trip, which was mainly to capture shore birds along the coast.
The summer of 2020 was challenging for us all and I am grateful I was able to still get out to a local natural area to do macro photography. It was my sole creative focus over the summer and some of my favorite macro photos I’ve ever taken were produced during those months. In late August I received the Fujifilm 100-400mm telephoto lens as a gift given the big sale that was going on at the time. In September and October as the fields withered and the season changed, macro photography wasn’t as viable, so I began to do more and more with the telephoto lens.
I wasn’t able to go very far for migratory birds and was happy to see birds I never thought I’d see in this part of New Jersey. A cormorant and belted kingfisher visited the riverside near the mill in town or a few weeks and I did get to see our resident great blue heron at the small waterfall in town multiple times.
As I enjoyed the fall colors and getting the occasional feathered friend, work demands increased prohibiting any day trips to the shore or other parks. We have a time after fall colors called brown season when most trees are bare, and the grey of December has yet to settle in. The only thing you can do at this time as a nature photographer is to hope for early snow in order to make the landscape pretty again.
In early December I headed out to my favorite natural area where I did my macro photography in the summer to see if there might be more birds around. It was around midday as I headed down the short, forested path to the first large field. It was barren now, looking very different without six-foot-tall grasses. As I walked around to one end, I noticed a light chirp or two. Approaching the woods at the edge of the field, I readied my camera and scanned the barren tree branches for what I thought were small Downy woodpeckers at first (very common to see them here).
Turns out there was a small flock of bluebirds moving in small groups from tree to tree. As I inched closer, they moved further. I didn’t have the telecoverter at the time so 600mm equivalent on my XT3 was the best I could do. A challenge of wildlife photography, at least in densely populated places like New Jersey, is they bring about such excitement that one forgets about things like shutterspeed, aperture, and how cold it was while trying to capture what you can before the wildlife moves.
