Birdfeeder Photography |
In May last year I moved back to my home country Slovakia. Birds here are not as tame as
in Montreal, where I lived for the past 5 years. In Montreal I was able to photograph many
birds within the minimum focusing distance of my EF 400/5.6L. Here it is much more
challenging to get close enough, both for small and large birds.
Therefore, last fall I decided to setup a bird feeder. Since I do not have my own backyard
(we live in an apartment building) I have chose carefully a place where to set it up.
It must not be on a private land, it should be reasonably close, and most of all I needed
to find a place with a nice background and all day good light. I choose a clearing in
bushes near Besenova water reservoir, see the star on the image bellow.
What I like best about this place is that the bushes are very thick and all around so
I have nearly always nice clean background. I started to feed in November. Birds discovered
the feeder quickly, they visited birdfeeder regularly, although not in big numbers.
Since my feeder is not near my house and I do not visit it everyday I needed to make an
automatic feeder so that there is enough seeds for a week or so. I came up with a very simple
design (inspired by a few designs I saw at Baumax – local construction material store).
The principle can be seen bellow.
This was my first design, later I needed to construct something much simpler and not as
nice looking, since my first feeder was stolen. You can see my second feeder on the
following images.
For bird photography I hvae always used a Doghouse blind from Ameristep. I have spent several
mornings and evenings in the blind. At first I always came early enough before sunset to hide
in a blind before birds arrive. Later I found out that even during seting up my
hide birds were coming to feed and they even did not care if I needed to go out for a while
or if I needed to move 5-10 meters aside to have better light.
Since I didn't want to photograph always on the same perch, I brought every time a fresh
perch with me. I had a battery operated drill that I could attach it at an angle I wanted.
This you can see above.
I was able to photograph several species of birds at the feeder: Great Tits,
Blue Tits, Greenfinches, and Hawfinches were the most common. Roe Deers and Foxes visited
as well. Bellow are some of the images I made:
Ruzomberok; April 10, 2005
|
