Spring weekend Birding

We spent the weekend in Pa Grand Canyon checking eagle nests for activity.  We confirmed sitting eagles in three of the seven nest we checked.  It can be a very boring exercise watching an eagle nest before young are hatched.  "Shift Changes" occur every three to four hours and are quick.  While the water is high in Pine Creek, the eagles look for food in other areas when not sitting on the nest.  The three nest we did not spot eagles in may very well have an adult in sitting on eggs as the nest walls are high and the angle of view is so that they could not be seen.

We did however have success at watching a pair of Barred owls going through there "dating routines".  It was fun to watch and listen to.  The Bluebird photo was taken with a flash with a better beamer attached.  I have been practicing with it to help fill in shadow areas when there is harsh lighting.

On the way to Doctor's Office

Our trip to the Doctor this afternoon was rewarding in terms of photography.  We spotted four Bald Eagles on a small Lake about 3 miles from our home.  Three were immatures and 1 was a transitioning adult.  One of the immatures was wearing a satellite tracking pack on his back.
Here are a couple  of "shots":

I had set the exposure for +.7 on the immature to bring out the detail in the body and then forgot to change back as the adult soared by.  the result is that I "blew out" the highlights in the white head.

PA Elk Ramblings

We visited the Elk County Pa again this past weekend.  We found that the bull elk still have their antlers and that they were still into aggressive sparring.  We also once again observed bulls still "sniffing" the cows. This is exceedingly late in the year as the bulls will soon be dropping their antlers.

We found nine bulls together in an area where we had previously observed eleven together.  One of the nine could be immediately identified as not being one of the eleven from three weeks ago as he was yet another bull with a "knob" for the right antler and this one has a poorly formed left antler.

That now makes the very mature bull that has a badly deformed right antler and a well developed 7 point left antler, two other bulls with a "knob" for right antler and immature 7 point left antlers and a fourth bull now with a "knob" for right antler and a poorly formed left antler.  It is quite clear that this is a genetic trend.  This type of genetic trait adds another "twist" to the management of the herd under the current methods being employed to manage the hunt.  Most hunters are applying to get their chance at "trophy" bulls and are paying a considerable fee to do so.  Recent publicity on one other blog has focused on the ability to get great bulls in PA (which is a very misleading statement-but that is not what  is being addressed here today).  Bulls such as the one pictured here are not favored by hunters and most likely will not be harvested. As long as the mature trophy bulls are harvested and bulls such as this are not, it will not be long before the majority of the bulls in the Pa herd will have the genetic trait of this bull.  Micro managing a small herd of animals and running a hunt that is not fair chase and is actually a "cull" of mature bulls will lead to the PA herd being one with what could be considered poor genetics.

The picture below is being offered as an example of preferential harvest.  The bull in that picture was very typical (according to my grandfather) for Pa at that time and the herd was hunted to almost extinction with little regard for conservation.  However, note the maturity of the whitetail deer in the picture.  That "quality" of bucks became a thing that was rarely harvested until the last few years when the Pa Game Commission has implemented a deer management program to better enable bucks to get to a mature age.  Our camp still stands a short distance from where this picture was taken and it is hard to even find a whitetail deer in that area now, let alone a "trophy" buck!

We saw a total of 23 bulls this weekend and well over 125 cows and calves.  Most of the bulls were immature.

We were able to enjoy 4 bulls feeding and sparring for three hours with friends Willard Hill, Richard Coy and Ron "Buckwheat" Saffer.  These photographs are "crops" of the originals that can be found on our photography website.  The cropping has been done for the blog to illustrate the size of the bulls versus the normal photographic composition.  I will be posting a "proper" rule of thirds photo of each for comparison later today.

The weekend ended with a fun session with a pileated woodpecker in a tree next to the cabin where we were staying. The weekend elk sessions and the final session with the pileated confirmed my love/hate relationship with the 200-400 Nikor f4 lens.  As long as the subjects are close, the lens performs superbly and gets very sharp pictures.  When the object being photographed is much beyond 75 feet if a full sized animal or 30 feet if a small object such as the wood pecker, the image starts getting soft on sharpness.

The parting "shot" for this week has to do with the ethics and good behavior of elk observation.  We are guests in Elk Country and we should respect private landowners when we are there.  One land owner talked with me and indicated that he appreciated the fact that I stayed in the highway to take pictures and that i parked my vehicle off the highway out of the way.  He said that a growing number of visitors to the area have little to no regard for private property and folks have gotten up in the morning only to find elk viewers and photographers not only on their property but on their decks!   A few inconsiderate people can spoil the fun and ability to enjoy these animals if this type of behavior persists.  If we observe such behavior, we should not wait for the land owner to challenge the individuals.  We should challenge and educate them ourselves.

Hawk and Backyard Birds

The snow storms have kept us close to home the past couple of weeks.  Experimentation with different D300 bodies and a Nikon 200-400 lens has been the recent "focus".  We were experiencing variability in reliability of focus on one of the bodies we thought with the 200-400 lens.  After significant experimentation we determined that the one body was going bad and it is going back for warranty repair.

I have been playing with bean bag versus window mount for telephoto shots from a vehicle blind.  This hawk was taken on a BLUB (Big Lens Ultimate Bag). The bag is filled with beans to provide weight, yet not be too heavy and bulky like sand would be.

I used my left hand to dampen lens vibration and held my breathe and gradually let it out as if I was firing a rifle.

The next two shots are using a Wimberley II head on a Gitzo tripod.

The Next two pictures are doing hand held 200-400 through a window!

the Sparrow shot showed very little movement, yet the rear leg is not in focus due to the short depth of field from using f5 to keep shutter speed as high as possible for the hand hold.

Bull 66

Here is another bull from the 11 bull group we saw on Gray Hill last Friday.  His collar has been cloned out-it has what looks to be 66 on it.  He is a good mature 6x6. We are hoping that we will still be able to see antlered bulls the weekend of March 5 and 6.  Below is a pano shot of the herd that was at the Winslow Hill viewing area on Friday.  The 6x6 bull can be seen laying above the group keeping them in "control".

Wintering PA Elk

I spent Friday with a friend touring the Benezett PA area looking for elk.  We did not see any in the normal spots, but the weather was cold and there was some hard wind.   We did observe over 80 elk from the Winslow Hill viewing area.  The herd bull was still showing rut behavior.  He was bugling and was "sniffing" the cows.  They initially were laying in the hollow below the viewing area.  The bull did his rounds and got the herd up and herded them to the top field to feed.  He was a fair sized 6x6.

We headed to Gray Hill from there and we found 11 bulls wintering together.  This is in the hunt zone and is said by some to be more remote and that the elk there are more wild.  My friend was amazed when I got out of the vehicle and set up my tripod and walked to where I could get some good pictures of some of the bulls.  The bulls remained standing or laying where they were and paid no attention to me. My friend and I stayed with them photographing them for well over an hour and they were not the least bit afraid of us. The elk in Pennsylvania have not learned to fear humans and continuing to hunt them in the scale that has been done in the past few years will only deplete the population of large bulls and will not create  real fair chase hunting.

One of the bulls had a malformed right antler.  He looked to be an older bull and had a very handsome left antler.  There were two other bulls that also had a short deformed stub for a right antler and a well formed left antler. They appeared to be younger and I would suspect that they were offspring of the larger bull with the deformed antler.











Having hunted elk in the western states, I can say that the behavior of the eastern elk is very different than those found in the western states.  The elk in the west, even those around Yellowstone Park are more wary of humans and are easily "spooked".  My friend (who is also a hunter) asked me how anyone could hunt the elk that we saw and with good conscience kill one of them in the name of fair chase.  I did not know how to answer his question.

Liberty Marsh Owls and Red Tail Hawks

We spent Sunday morning and early afternoon  at Liberty Marsh in southern New York State observing raptors.  We had an eventful morning with two female harriers scooting around but they would not come close enough for good photography.  The usual Red Tail Hawk did her routine with sitting on the wire and then diving to catch mice.  She seems to like to have her photograph taken. 

I experimented with ISO from 500 to 1250 and aperture from 7.1 to 11 to see how I could get the sharpest images of her.  I wanted to keep the shutter speed fast enough so that if she decided to fly, I could get crisp flight pictures. I found that with a hawk or eagle I set the exposure comp to at least +.7 when taking pictures against the sky-that insures that the foreground comes out correctly exposed. The coaching I have been receiving is paying off-I have upped my minimum acceptable shutter speed from 1/1000 to 1/1250 and will use ISO up to 1250 on the D300.  I use neat image noise ninja to control noise.

I even experimented to manual exposure by exposing for the bird and that way if the bird takes flight an d dips below treeline, the exposure for the bird is still correct and the background can not "fool" the meter.

While we were watching, all of the crows starting taking off and the harriers and red tails took off for the edge of the marsh.  We suspected one of the area eagles might be approaching.  However, a friend pointed out a peregrine falcon coasting around off in the distance.  Once he left, the crows and hawks returned to feeding in the marsh.    Early afternoon we took a short trip down the road to visit the long ear owls that have taken residence in an evergreen tree for the winter.    

                                                                                             One sits out somewhat in the open and naps along.  The other one likes to sit closer to the tree trunk. We used a low powered flashlight to barely light the feathers on this one.  

We ended the day by driving to the Shawangunk Grasslands NWR and walked back in to wait for the evening to come.  There were three male harriers floating around, but they stayed quite a distance away.  Five female harriers started hunting just before dark and then we were rewarded for our wait by the emergence of the short ear owls just before dark.  I spotted 16 separate short ear owls.  It was a wonderful sight.  I tried photographing them in flight, but it was too dark.  

I want to thank two mentors for their help through my journey as a "budding" photographer.  Thanks Mark Picard and Herb Houghton.

Jim