ABA Blog

Secrets of Digital Bird Photography

I just found a great new book about digital bird photography.  Secrets of Digital Bird Photography, by Bill
Majoros, is an online book worth a perusal by anyone from rank beginners to well-seasoned avian shutterbugs.  Best of all, the book is free! (Bill accepts donations to offset his web hosting costs- if you find the book helpful please consider chipping in.)  Take a look at the table of contents below to get a feeling for how comprehensive this book is.  Each section is hot linked so that jumping to a particular topic is just a click away, a boon for a book with this much information (900+ pages worth!) Big thumbs up- check this out &/or refer it to your bird photog buddies!

Chapter 1 : Introduction	Chapter 10 : Fundamentals of Image Processing
1.1 Introduction	10.1 Zooming, Cropping, and Resolution
1.2 A Note about Editions	10.2 Pixels and Bits
1.3 Brief Outline	10.3 Image Layers
Part I : Equipment	10.4 Visual Qualities
Chapter 2 : Cameras	10.5 Editing History
2.1 DSLR Cameras	10.6 Selection
2.2 Point-and-shoot Cameras and Digiscoping	Chapter 11 : Common Tasks
2.3 Megapixels and Crop Factors	11.1 Reducing Noise
2.4 Brands	11.2 Fixing Blown Highlights
2.5 ISO	11.3 Correcting Exposure
2.6 Autofocus	11.4 Eye Shine and Catchlights
2.7 Bells and Whistles	11.5 Removing Unwanted Items
2.8 Cleaning your DSLR	11.6 Sharpening
Chapter 3 : Lenses	11.7 Correcting Color, Saturation and Tilt
3.1 Focal Length and Aperture	Chapter 12 : Developing a Workflow
3.2 Zoom versus Prime	12.1 An Example Workflow
3.3 Special Glasses and Coatings	12.2 Structuring Your Archive
3.4 Teleconverters and Extension Tubes	12.3 Filtering
3.5 Image Stabilization	12.4 Conversion from RAW
3.6 Third-party Lenses	12.5 Separation of Subject
3.7 Sharpness and Bokeh	12.6 De-emphasizing the Background
3.8 Bells and Whistles	12.7 Sizing and Signatures
3.9 Cleaning Lenses	Chapter 13 : Advanced Techniques
3.10 Buying Lenses Used	13.1 Replacing the Background
3.11 Lens Calibration	13.2 Adding Artificial Clouds
3.12 Carrying Lenses in the Field	13.3 HDR and Tone Mapping
3.13 Other Considerations	13.4 Simulating Motion Blur
Chapter 4 : Accessories	13.5 Merging Poses
4.1 Tripods	Part IV : Distribution
4.2 Tripod Heads	Chapter 14 : Making and Selling Prints
4.3 External Flash	14.1 Practical Printing Issues
4.4 Other Accessories	14.2 Matting and Framing Prints
Chapter 5 : The Digital Darkroom	14.3 Putting Your Photos on Display
5.1 Choosing a Computer	14.4 Selling Bird Photos
5.2 Choosing a Monitor	Chapter 15 : Making a Slideshow DVD
5.3 Hard Drives	15.1 Software for DVD Production
5.4 Options for Backup	15.2 Image Quality
5.5 Card Readers	15.3 Obtaining Royalty-free Music
5.6 Image Processing Software	15.4 DVD Duplication and Packaging
Part II : Technique	Chapter 16 : Sharing Your Photos
Chapter 6 : Operating the Camera	16.1 Photo Hosting Sites
6.1 F-stops, Shutter Speeds, and ISO	16.2 Building a Custom Web Site
6.2 Exposing to the Right	16.3 Advertising Your Site
6.3 Exposure Modes	Appendix
6.4 Metering Modes	A. Additional Sources of Information
6.5 Autofocus Modes	Subject Index
6.6 Drive Modes	Photo Gallery
6.7 Selecting AF Points
6.8 Rapid Exposure Adjustments
6.9 Exposure Bracketing and HDR
6.10 RAW Versus JPG
6.11 Mirror Lock-up and Live View
Chapter 7 : Using Flash
7.1 Why Use Flash?
7.2 How Flash Works
7.3 Built-in Versus External Flash
7.4 Powering Your Flash Unit
7.5 Flash Settings and Exposure
7.6 Fill Flash Versus Flash as Main Light
7.7 Freezing Hummingbirds
7.8 Dealing with Red-eye and Steel-eye
7.9 Flash Extenders
7.10 Avoiding a Meltdown
7.11 Other Issues
Chapter 8 : Field Techniques
8.1 General Composition Principles
8.2 Angles and Light
8.3 Poses and Aliasing
8.4 Getting Close
8.5 Steadying the Camera
8.6 Being Flexible in the Field
8.7 Some Popular Bird Photography Locations
8.8 Planning a Bird Photography Trip
8.9 Photographing Warblers
8.10 Photographing Birds in Flight
Chapter 9 : Turning Your Yard into a Studio
9.1 Natural and Artificial Perches
9.2 Rustic Embellishments
9.3 Backgrounds

 

Mic up that iPhone: Follow Up

I think I still have a ways to go before I'd call myself an authority on using an iPhone (or similar device) to produce bird recordings, but I've learned a lot since my initial post on this topic about a month ago.  Let me comment on three aspects of acquiring bird sounds on an iPhone.

1) Getting sounds into your device.

• Good:  If a bird is close or loud enough, the built-in mic can capture acceptable recordings.
• Better:  An iPhone/iPod/etc. specific mic can add a lot of reach.  I'm still happy with the  Edutige EIM-001 i-Microphone Voice Recorder- it is small (almost too small- easy to misplace) & fairly cheap and really boosts the audio.  The sound quality isn't necessarily professional, but not bad for documenting & researching bird sounds.
• Best: A high-quality shotgun mic:  David La Puma and others have figured out that an iPhone/iPod/etc. can be a great digital bird sound recorder if you have a quality shotgun mic to capture vocalizations.  The problem is that normal mics won't record to the iPhone/iPod/etc. jack, which is designed for both input and output (iPhone headphones have a built-in mic for phone conversations, talking to Siri, etc.)  An adapter is needed if you want to pipe in sound from a good mic, & fortunately these are available through 3rd party manufacturers.  For example, the kV Connections iPhone 1/8" Microphone Adapter will allow input from a powered mic with a 1/8" (3.5mm) jack.  kV Connections also makes other adapters for different mic types so check them out if you are looking for an input solution.

2) Selecting an app for your recordings.

• Good: Use the device's built-in voice memo app.  Free, works fine.
• Better (maybe?):  Use a 3rd-party recording app (free or cheap) if its features and interface are more to your liking.  For now, I've settled on Recorder (free).  Recordings are pretty easy to get off the phone and onto your computer.  File types are limited to AIFF or MP3, probably fine for dabblers like myself.
• Best:  Use a professional field recording app like FiRe 2 ($6).  Link over to see the impressive list of features this app boasts...

3) Selecting sound processing software to use on your computer.  I'm too far out of my league to offer much meaningful insight here.  Perhaps folks with more experience can offer suggestions for us in the comments or in another blog post??  

• Good:  Use free audio editing software like Audacity.  It has some basic filters, produces spectrograms, & the price is right!  Ted Floyd has figured out some neat tricks with Audacity & I hope he'll comment on these or offer up a post on the topic...
• Also Good:  Cornell's free Raven Light lets users record, save, and visualize sounds as spectrograms and waveforms.  Editing options are limited, though.   Andrew Spencer offers some great tips & tricks to using this software at Earbirding.com.
• Better/Best:  Sound guru Nathan Pieplow extols Adobe Audition on his Earbirding.com blog & offers Audition editing tips & tricks in one of his posts.  Can anyone comment on Cornell's Raven Pro or other options to consider for serious bird sound editing??

Vocalizing Canyon Wren © Bill Schmoker, Jefferson County, Colorado, March 2009

Albatros Bookmarks- Looks like a great field guide accessory!

I recently stumbled across a pretty neat-looking bookmark concept that may add a lot of functionality to field guides and other frequently-used references: the Albatros Bookmark (yeah, that's how it is spelled.) The birdy name is a happy coincidence, but I think that avibibliophiles like myself will think of many books where a permanent installation might be just the ticket. 

llustration by Jean Jullien

A bit of explaination from the maker:

What is the Albatros bookmark?

The Albatros is a new kind of bookmark that follows your reading. No need to remember the page number, each time you turn one, it inserts itself at the right place. The Albatros bookmarks have been invented and developed by Oscar Lhermitte and are made in France.

What makes the Albatros bookmarks so cool?

See it this way: the Albatros bookmark enables you to forget about bookmarks. Once you’ve placed it in your book, it will take care of the rest. If you are reading a novel and suddenly have to rush to catch the bus, simply drop the book in your bag; you will find the Albatros at the page you stopped last.

How does it work?

The Albatros bookmark consists of a thin piece of polyester that is inserted in the book; thanks to its structure and shape, every time you turn a page, the bookmark follows it. Placing the bookmark in a book is done in the blink of an eye. Its repositionable adhesive allows it to last a long time without damaging any pages. Once you have finished reading the book, leave the bookmark in place for the next reader, or simply discard it. It works on any book, pocketbook, sketchbook, diary, of any format. Only books over 700 pages tend to be a bit tricky.

Here's a video showing the product in action:

 

  

This is a new independent product launch being funded through Indiegogo.com, a platform where people can solicit funding for all kinds of campaigns.  These devices look like a hit already- designer Oscar Lhermitte sought $3000 for an initial production run but his campaign has already sold over $41,000 worth of bookmarks as of the morning of 21 March.  Here's the thing, though- to get in on the initial production run you've got to order by Friday, 23 March.  Many quantity options are available but don't forget to add shipping if you aren't in the UK.  If you don't get in on the deal by Friday, watch for product details at http://www.albatrosbookmark.com.  

Dutson: Birds of Melanesia

Few even are the birders who, on hearing a mention of Melanesia, can confidently put their fingers on the map. Fewer still are the birders who will actually get to visit this vast stretch of tropical islands, extending from New Guinea to Fiji off the northern and eastern coast of Australia.

Whether we know where they are or not, however, those islands have been the site of monumental research into avian distribution and speciation, conducted over more than a century by some of the world's most important biologists and evolutionary theorists; at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we cannot think about birds without thinking--at whatever remove--about the work done by such scholars as Ernst Mayr and Jared Diamond, whose 2001 book The Birds of Northern Melanesia was called by David Bishop "the single most important publication on evolutionary biology since Darwin's." 

The results of all that island evolution are on handsome display in this splendid new guide from Princeton University Press. I'm fairly sure that I'll never get to Melanesia, but after reading Guy Dutson's work--and relishing the fine illustrations by Richard Allen, Adam Bowley, John Cox, and Tony Disley--I'm inspired to try.

The guide covers the birds of fourteen island groups belonging to four nations. Given the high rates of endemism and the pronounced geographic variation shown by many species, this could have been a nightmare of book design; but the challenge is elegantly met here. A careful reading of the front matter's explanation and a little practice was all it took to unlock the clever system of color-coded distribution bars, which not only show which island groups are inhabited by a given species but also reveal its status as an endemic, a resident, a regular migrant or vagrant, an introduced species, or extinct. All this information is provided both on the caption pages of the plates and in a convenient tabular checklist, making it easy for the lucky birder to prepare for a trip to one or the other of the islands.

The guide comprises two sections, one containing 86 beautiful plates with their facing-page captions and distribution charts, the other the species accounts. The texts are headed with the species' English, French, and scientific names, often with notes indicating different taxonomic approaches, and include a description, an often extensive treatment of similar species, voice descriptions, accounts of habit and habitat often including flight style, a statement of each bird's conservation status, and a detailed (often island-by-island) summary of geographic distribution. 

Melanesia as defined here covers some 42,000 square miles. To minimize page flipping, the guide's passerine plates are broken into seven color-coded sections, one for each of the major island groups included. Thus, the birder visiting New Caledonia and confronted with an unfamiliar songbird has to consult only five plates, the visitor to the Bismarcks 11, and so on; the non-passerines, many of which, especially the water birds, are widely distributed among the islands, occupy the first 49 plates. There is necessarily some repetition in the case of species occurring across several island groups, but the artists and the designer have taken this as an opportunity to display regional variation in several species; have a look, for example, at the various Island Thrushes or the Cardinal Myzomelas, some of which differ strikingly from their counterparts on other islands.

In addition to the usual habitat descriptions, regional maps, and conservation discussion, the guide's introductory material includes a dozen pages on birding Melanesia, with practical tips for finding birds on 20 islands and island groups; one gets an unvarnished sense of just how difficult, even dangerous many of these sites are to visit.

The book is refreshingly well edited and proofread, the only major goof the English names given Tachybaptus novaehollandiae at the top of Plate I. (It should be Australasian Grebe.) It's a pleasure to leaf through this guide, which serves very well indeed the author's and artists' intention to "stimulate the study and conservation" of the beautiful birds of a remote and alluring part of the globe.

Whole Lot of Shakin' NOT Going On!

Last weekend my friend Mike Freiberg, Nikon's Birding Market Specialist, invited me to join him for some digiscoping tests on Nikon's latest scope offering, the 85mm EDG VR Fieldscope.  What makes the scope really interesting to me is the VR part- it stands for Vibration Reduction, Nikon's image stabilization system (similar to Canon's IS, Panasonic's O.I.S., etc.)  Essentially, Nikon took the VR mechanism found in their camera lenses and put it into a high-end spotting scope.  

Nikon 85mm EDG VR.  The boxy part behind the scope mount is the compartment for 4 AA batteries.

VR controls on top in front of the eyepiece.  Green light = VR on!  There is also a lock-out so you won't inadvertently run the batts down when the scope isn't in use.

After trying the rig out I can say that the VR really made a noticeable difference.  I digiscoped many subjects to see how it worked, including challenging situations such as moving birds or skulkers in low light.  My conclusion is that the VR truly eliminated most of the blur-inducing shake that is the bane of digiscoping. Below are some examples I obtained by hand-holding my Panasonic DMC-G1 body /Olympus 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 14-42mm II R Lens combo to the scope, which had a 30X wide eyepiece mounted.  I imagine that results would be even better with a digisoping mount instead of just hand-holding the camera.

Golden-crowned Sparrow, Red Rocks Park, Morrison, CO 7 Jan 2012.  This regional rarity is delighting birders for a second consecutive winter, but likes to lurk back in the bushes & shadows.  At ISO 400 I was only getting 1/125 second shutter speed but still got a nice shot despite hand-holding my camera rig to the scope's eyepiece.

Another nice bird hanging out in Colorado this winter is this young male Long-tailed Duck at Denver City Park Lake, digiscoped 7 Jan 2012.  Besides a cloudy sky, a challenge here was the constantly swimming & diving duck.  Panning technique doesn't always yield good results when digiscoping but the VR really helped to deliver a steady image to the camera's sensor (here a 1/320 second exposure.)

Mike Freiberg had his scope rigged with a Nikon DSLR adapter and shot this video to show the effect of activating the VR during some windy digiscoping.  Ride out the shaky stuff at the beginning- it is worth the wait to see how the VR cancels out most vibration when he activates the feature towards the end of the short video.

 

 

In summary, the advantages of adding image stabilization to a scope include a much better image when viewing in windy conditions or when tracking moving birds.  It is also a huge advantage when digisocoping, as the technique notoriously magnifies any problems with scope movement or vibration, particularly when slower shutter speeds are dictated by less-than ideal light.   Camera lens stabilizing doesn't help the problem as the scope is acting as the primary lens, but this finally puts the VR where it is needed.

Disadvantages include increased scope weight & cost, as well as the need to manage batteries (in this case 4 AAs, with a set expected to last 17 viewing hours.)

I think it will be very interesting to see how this technology is received by birders & wildlife aficionados, and if image stabilizing will find its way into other manufacturers' lines.

 

Duivendijk: A New, Revised, Bigger, More Legible Edition

Just the briefest of notes to remind everyone that Nils van Duivendijk's Advanced Bird ID Handbook was issued in a second edition late in 2011.

It's a chunk of a book, with print large enough even for my eyes; those looking for a field-worthy version will want to stick with the first, neatly pocket-sized edition, but it's so cheap that there's no reason not to buy both!

 

Happy Holidays

I hope you all had a great holiday season and wish you a happy new year!  

I have had a few recent emails about my last Geared for Birding column in Winging It.  Some regarded difficulty with some of the TinyURL links for some of the gear ideas I listed.  Here are the live links for your clicking convenience:

Kleen Kanteen widemouth stainless steel bottle 

LockDown binocular harness

BinoBib protective cover

Liberty Graphics David Sibley fine printed bird designs T-shirts 

Gitzo 2-way fluid birding tripod head 

Snackworms live or roasted wax worms 

Sheltered mealworm/waxworm bluebird feeder

RainCoat protective camera cover 

Peterson Birds of North America app

Sigma 50-500mm Super Telephoto Zoom lens

Olympus M. Zuiko Digital ED 14-42mm lens

Think Tank StreetWalker HardDrive 

ABA Sales Partners:  

Eagle Optics

Buteo Books

Song Bird Coffee

 

I also had a few inquiries about 4-section tripods suitable for travel as I mentioned them in the column.  I'm a fan of Gitzo carbon tripod legs because of their construction quality, stability-to-weight ratio, solid locking mechanisms, and durability.  They aren't cheap but neither are great optics, and I don't like my tripod to be the limiting factor in my scoping & digiscoping activities.  Gitzo's numbering system also is really easy to understand, with their Series 0 being the lightest-rated models (up to 11 lbs.) and Series 4 being the heaviest (but out of the realm of all but the most monstrous of monster camera rigs.)  For compact scopes or those wanting to squeeze every gram out of their system, Series 0 legs can work, though I think for full-sized scopes a Series 1 tripod (rated for up to 17 lbs.) will give more stability.  Typical models come with three leg sections but going to 4-section tripods allows the legs to collapse into a smaller package, handy for traveling.  The downside is a bit more cost (as each leg has an additional locking mechanism) and a bit more set-up time.

Here's a nice 4-section Series 0 tripod, the GT-0541 Carbon Mountaineer.

And here's the Series 1 equivalent, the GT-1541 Carbon Mountaineer.

Gitzo also has Safari Series tripods, geared towards birders and wildlife photographers with a low-profile green finish and dust, mud, grit & water-resistant locking mechanisms.  For example, see the GT-1540S Carbon Safari 4-section tripod.

Gitzo's Basalt-composite tripods are a wee bit heavier but more affordable, and retain most of the brand's advantages.  Take a peek at the GT-1840C 4-section Basalt tripod.

Many birders have used Bogen/Manfrotto legs, and there are also 4-section offerings in this line.  These are going to be a little heavier than their Gitzo cousins and in my opinion have balkier locking mechanisms, but are still very high quality and have a solid track record.  A lighter option, equivalent to Gitzo's Series 0, is the Manfrotto 190CXPRO4  while the Manfrotto 055CXPRO4 has a load rating similar to Gitzo's Series 1.

I'm sure there are other great options out there that I'm not familiar with- feel free to leave any suggestions you may have in the comments!!

Enjoy- Bill Schmoker

Spencer Schaffner: Binocular Vision

Spencer Schaffner’s Binocular Vision starts from the simple and important observation that field guides—like all texts—“do cultural work.” Behind and beyond their stated purposes, field guides affirm assumptions and create expectations in their users; Binocular Vision is a critical exploration of those assumptions and expectations, and many of the conclusions the book offers will be an unsettling surprise to many of its birding readers.

In five short chapters, Schaffner argues that modern birdwatching as practiced in the United States—and as reflected and, simultaneously, formed by its central texts—is not conservationist and environmentalist at all, but rather serves to efface the huge problems facing our birds and their habitats. Schaffner finds that most field guides and most birding neutralize our awareness of environmental challenges by constructing birds as separate from their physical settings and by presenting even the most toxic of artificial landscapes as benign. Along the way, the author serves up an indictment of some of North American birding’s most prominent and cherished institutions and practices; at times badly overstated, the book’s criticisms should nevertheless make all of us into more carefully self-aware birders.

Schaffner begins with a historical overview of the foundations of American birdwatching and its explicit link to forms of conservation at the end of the nineteenth century; he demonstrates well how the popular texts of the day joined sentiment, anthropomorphism, and moral judgment to enlist readers on the side of the birds. Schaffner contrasts these early works, chief among them guides written by Florence Merriam (later Bailey) and Mabel Osgood Wright, with the more strictly “technical,” soi-disant scientific approach taken starting in the 1920s.

The review is a welcome one, but what I miss in this chapter is a discussion of the evolution of the cultural gendering of birdwatching. It is no accident that these early writers were women or that so many of their books are addressed to children; and it is no coincidence that the re-gendering of serious birding as male, a status it still occupies today, was accomplished by stripping the field guide of its “feminine” features, replacing tales of bird family life with measurements and complex terminologies.

Schaffner goes on in Chapter 2 to explore the disconnect between the idea of birdwatching as biophily and the “management” required to sustain many species. Many birders will describe their hobby as a celebration of life; in fact, though, as the author points out, many of the birder’s most beloved objects are saved only at the expense of a great deal of death. For example, gulls are culled—killed—to protect plovers and terns (Schaffner misses the bitter irony that the abundance of the large gulls today is due in large part to the cessation of human persecution in the nineteenth century). Mute Swans have gone from icons of feathered beauty to a menace requiring control. Perhaps the most eloquent example of all goes almost unmentioned here: we poison thousands of blackbirds to keep them from eating the sunflower seed we’ll feed to our backyard birds in the winter. I wish, too, that Schaffner had enlarged his discussion of crow hunting and crow control to include the eradication two decades ago of Western Jackdaws from Canada, the perfect illustration of the tension between the birder’s desire to observe and the birdwatcher’s need to protect “good” birds from the potentially bad.

The most fascinating section of Binocular Vision is the discussion in Chapter 3 of efforts in field guides and in fine art to reverse the isolation of birds from their settings. Schaffner’s prime example here is American Bird Conservancy’s All the Birds, which intentionally places many of its bird portraits against such sadly realistic backgrounds as landfills and airports. The author discovers an ambiguity in many such scenes—are the birds shown as threatened by encroaching development or as adapting to it?—but their import remains clear: birds belong to places, and too many places have been altered by human activities.

The plate from All the Birds that Schaffner selects for close examination in this chapter is perhaps even more interesting than his discussion recognizes. The painter, Jack Griggs, places his American Pipits and Horned Larks on what looks like pavement, with urban San Francisco in the background and a large plane in the air above. Oddly, and possibly in contradiction of Schaffner’s larger argument about the book, single Sprague’s and Red-throated Pipits and a Sky Lark—all in classic “technical” field guide poses—float at the top of the plate, disassociated from any habitat context and from each other. Surely this says something about the painter’s or the designer’s attitudes to rarity and difficulty, and it may well also reflect some of that ancient eastern bias that lingers still in so many field guides. Here and occasionally elsewhere in Binocular Vision, the reader is left wanting to learn more.

Given the author’s expertise in the study of new media, Chapter 4, “Technojumping into Electronic Field Guides,” should have been the book’s best. Schaffner notes the tendency in some of the new e-guides to simply reproduce book pages on a computer screen, at best with the addition of sound files. He also hints at the new types of birderly socialization incipient in some online guides. What the author does not point out is that the navigation required to use these guides in many cases reverts, ironically, to the key structures at the base of some of the earliest technical field guides; in this sense, the e-guide, for all its technological pride, in fact represents a step back a hundred years or more.

Schaffner saves his most controversial points for last. In “Birding on Toxic Land,” he implicates competitive birding and listing in the perpetuation of a conservative conservation ethic and the cover-up of some of this country’s most screaming environmental problems. Eagerly birding sewage ponds, landfills, and toxic waste sites “overwrites those sites as healthy”; Schaffner contrasts the near-complacence of such behavior with the “radical image events” staged by more focused environmentalist groups. He finds that the strategies favored by moderate conservation organizations, especially fund-raising, are in fact readily co-opted by industry and its friends to perpetuate rather than to combat environmental degradation—a serious charge, and one leveled here squarely at such influential groups as New Jersey Audubon and such successful events as the World Series of Birding. Overstatement is one of my favorite rhetorical tools, too, but I believe that Schaffner ignores a number of examples where local birding groups have in fact pressed hard for the improvement of toxic environments, sometimes (as in the case of Tucson Audubon and the Avra Valley Wastewater Treatment Plant) at a clear cost to the birding opportunities those sites had offered before their clean-up.

I encourage every birder to read and to ponder this important book. A word to the wise: though Schaffner carefully avoids much of the critical jargon available to him, his prose here (surprisingly, to those of us who have read other of his writings) is more than a bit of a slog, full of repetition and infelicity. But stick with it. You’ll find yourself alternately fascinated and infuriated, and continually inspired to think through these issues yourself. 

 

Show Your Colors!!! Shop@ABA is Now Open!

It's been quite a while since a good selection of ABA logo wear has been available and we've had many requests to bring it back. We've also heard a lot of suggestions that perhaps we ought to consider some more vibrant colors, as well as styles more friendly and flattering to women.

Thanks to the hard work and persistence of a bunch of folks here, especially Bryan Patrick and David Hartley, you can now Shop@ABA. Starting immediately, you can pick from a nice variety of clothing for men, women, and juniors, as well as a selection of accessories including binocular straps and life list pins.

This is not a replacement for ABA Sales. You can still buy great books, optics, and coffee from our partners at Buteo Books, Eagle Optics, and Thanksgiving Coffee. In fact, we very much hope you will, being sure to mention that you're an ABA member. But we wanted to offer you a way to buy ABA-branded clothing and gear directly from us.

I can say from first-hand experience that the clothes are high-quality and easy to wear. I had a blast getting members of the staff, their families, and other friends of the ABA to model the clothes. I took pretty much all the photos, except the one of me in the Grosbeak Blue shirt, which Liz shot next door at the Garden of the Gods.

We've been testing the new web store since Thursday and it seems to be working like a charm. If you encounter any issues or something strikes you as confusing or out of place, let me or David Hartley know, or just leave a comment below. Or, if you're completely wowed, you could let us know that, too.

What we have now is just a preliminary selection. We'll be adding cooler weather items before long. And we're always happy to have your suggestions of colors and styles we ought to consider stocking.

I'll close with a copy of the ad that our designer, Ed Rother, put together for the July issue of Birding. We didn't have the web store up when that went to press, and just to be extra cautious we didn't include a URL on it. But if you click on the ad, it'll take you right to the web store. You'll also see that you can order directly from First Lady Liz at 800-850-2473 xt 232.

We hope you'll like this new store as much as we do. Let's show those colors!

A Mobile Tech-Fueled Surfbird Photo Quest

This past December I found myself in Monterey, California, with a couple of days to spare before a meeting back north in Menlo Park.  High on my birding agenda was an attempt at a good photo of a Surfbird, which I had only previously digiscoped at dusk & at a distance, with less than stellar results.

It continues to amaze me how far portable communication technology has come in the last decade.  A device as small as a proverbial deck of cards can be incredibly useful to a traveling birder on a time budget.  My iPhone replaces the need to carry a bundle of books including field guides, regional birding guides, and gazetteers/atlasses/maps. For many purposes such as email or web searches a smartphone also usurps the need for a laptop. It became an indispensable asset in my quest for a nice Surfbird shot.

I began my quest by (gasp) using my phone to call a local birding buddy who would have the gen on finding a photo-friendly Surfbird.  My friend Brian Sullivan (another steady contributer to this blog and an amazing birder & bird photographer) immediately suggested a gull and shorebird roost at Point Pinos.  Previously, finding the right one of many possible pullouts along the drive south of Monterey would have entailed Brian's production of detailed directions and trust in my ability to follow them while driving solo through unfamiliar territory, but Brian just asked if I had the BirdsEye app.  Replying in the affirmative, he simply gave me the hotspot name.   BirdsEye listed nearby hotspots, I selected the one in question and had the software map a route from my location in a supermarket parking lot to the desired destination.

Finding a nearby birding hotspot on BirdsEye is as easy as clicking on a red pin on the zoomable map.

 

With one click BirdsEye kicks you into the iPhone mapping system to get you to the desired hotspot.  You can also produce a list of turn-by-turn directions if you are textually inclined.

 

Brian mentioned that the shorebird photography there would be best at high tide.  I switched iPhone modes to log onto the Weather Undergound mobile web site, which includes marine forecasts and tide tables for coastal localities.  Armed with the local tide chart, I plotted an arrival time to coincide with the high tide and nearby resting shorbird flock it would produce.

 

An example tide chart for Point Pinos, my intended destination for Surfbird photo opps.

To arm myself for the search I refreshed my memory of the pertinent field marks of a Surfbird.  I have several North American field guides on my iPhone and I flipped to the Sibley Guide app for a review.  I also had a peek at the species photos and a listen to Surfbird calls on BirdsEye (after all, I don't get much practice with the species here in Colorado!)

 

OK, this is what I'm looking for...

 

And here's what I'll listen for...  

When I arrived there indeed were scads of shorebirds tucked on and among the rocks, waiting for the tide to ebb before dispersing far and wide to exposed feeding beaches and rocks.  Soon I found the stocky, yellow-legged target of my intentions among many Black-bellied Plovers, Sanderlings, Turnstones, Willets, Whimbrels, and a few Black Oystercatchers.  I found a good angle from a protected cranny amongst the damp granite boulders, hunkered down to wait for the bird to get clear of the crowd, and eventually got my wish- a fab shot of the bird despite a very limited amount of time to get it.  Thanks, Brian, & thanks, iPhone!

Success!