Mokka mit Schlag » Birding

This weekend I rented a Canon EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 L IS USM zoom lens. This is the first L series lens I’ve used for any length of time. Unfortunately, yesterday was too rainy and overcast to give it a real workout; but today was much clearer and I got to the park bright and early around 8 AM. Wow. the difference between this lens and the lenses I had been using bird photography was like night and day. Just look at this House Sparrow:

With and without flash, the images were crisp, sharp, and more often than not in focus. I was actually able to start choosing which images to keep based on composition and the interest of the picture. I no longer had to select only the one or two sharp images out of 100. For the first time, I was able to take super telephoto pictures that came out as sharp as the images taken with my hundred millimeter prime lens.
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I spent a few hours in the park today, mostly just to experiment with the camera, but I still managed to tally 26 species including my first Buffleheads of the year:

• Mute Swan
• American Black Duck
• American Black Duck x Mallard (hybrid)
• Mallard
• Northern Shoveler
• Bufflehead
• Ruddy Duck
• Great Blue Heron
• Black-crowned Night-Heron
• American Coot
• Ring-billed Gull
• Herring Gull
• Rock Pigeon
• Belted Kingfisher
• Red-bellied Woodpecker
• Downy Woodpecker
• Eastern Phoebe
• American Crow
• Tufted Titmouse
• White-breasted Nuthatch
• Ruby-crowned Kinglet
• Hermit Thrush
• American Robin
• European Starling
• Chipping Sparrow
• Song Sparrow
• White-throated Sparrow
• Northern Cardinal

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I spent the morning in Prospect Park with the Brooklyn Bird Club, but apparently the action was in Central park where Starr Saphir’s NYC Audubon walk found a Sedge Wren on the Great Hill, a relatively rare bird for New York. I didn’t get the news until I got home around 2:00 P.M. but the bird was still there when I arrived at 3:45:

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I walked around the lake in Prospect Park today, looking to see if any of the old four banded geese were still around. No such luck. They may have moved on. However I did find a fifth banded goose from the sames series, NA49:

It has been hanging out since at least January of this year.

After some more experimentation with my Tamron 28-300 Di VC, I think I finally understand what this lens is and what to do with it. It is a closeup lens, not a telephoto lens. That is, it takes really good pictures fairly close (within a few meters) and pretty crappy ones far away. For example look at this nice close-up of a juvenile American coot taken at 300mm:

Santee Lakes, San Diego County, 2009-08-23
1/800 s, f/6.3, ISO 400, handheld

It’s pretty good, especially around the body where you can easily make out the individual feathers. In fact, if anything, it’s over-sharp; though that’s probably just a combination of me over-sharpening it in Lightroom and the JPEG conversion. The original full-size photo is even better than this.

Now compare to this shot of a far-away coot taken with the same lens. You’d expect the subject to be smaller, but it’ worse than that: very, very fuzzy and unsharp, even with a much faster shutter speed:
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Now that I’ve moved back to Brooklyn that pretty much closes out my BGBY effort for Orange County at 161, well short of the 200 species I was shooting for. 200 was a stretch but if I had had the extra 4 months, I could easily have added another 10-20 species. At least I managed to improve last year’s total by 2.

The silver lining is that now I get to start a new list for Brooklyn. (I suppose if I had bicycled across the country I could combine the two lists, but, as much fun as that sounds, I don’t have that sort of time or strength.) I’ve made a few excursions to Prospect Park (including 2 back in March) and I’m now starting the year with a very respectable 75 species:
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