Thank You Charlotte.
3 years ago the wife got home from the morning school run with the Grand-kids. There was a steady cold rain coming down.
She said, "There's a baby bird out front on the driveway and it looks hurt." It was a hummer with a damaged wing.
We tried to save it, I fed it sugar nectar, took it out and gently held it to flowers and it tongued nectar out of them.
She died after two days of nursing her. Nectar was good, but she needed gnats for protein I learned.
But the morning of that second day I put up a couple of small feeders. Late in the afternoon a female showed up and spent a while drinking and looking around. The next day she came back and brought about 5 more. And it just grew from there.
Soon I had to hang bigger and bigger feeders to keep up. I was filling smaller feeders as much as 3 times a day. It was time consuming and nerve wracking.
Now there are 6 big feeders up, we go through 25 to 50 pounds of sugar a month depending on the time of year, and we and our neighbors just love watching them.
We also have plenty of flowers around for them to choose if they want to. Since we live in Southern California, some of the Anna's have wintered over with us. About 6-8 I believe.
During migration we have become a watering hole for them. At times there might be 60-80-100 darting in and out, feeding, or waiting to feed.
So it seems it would be best to photograph them. That way I can begin to see what they are. So far I have Anna's and Allens, but I'm sure there are some others, or variants.
So it behooves me to work on capturing them in pictures.
I took around 113 pictures this morning, then cropped them down to in the forties due to blur-blah-or-bore.
Maybe not great pictures, but a few are really nice compared to past efforts with the equipment I had available. My first digital was a Casio pocket camera. Human zoom, +/- 40-50 pictures before download, pretty much all the features of dull pencil. State of the art and only $500 in the early/mid 1990's.
But, it was digital. It downloaded into my Packard Bell 486DX computer. Wow...
Climbing mountains begins with one step at a time. Digging a hole begins with the first shovel full.
Somewhere in over my head:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mf634ov5bhe8pg7/DSC_0036.JPGhttps://www.dropbox.com/s/zm6m09xit46vikg/DSC_0037.JPGA female Anna's humming bird, Nikon D3300, Auto setting, Quiet shutter setting, 55-200mm lens.
With a turd holding and running the camera.
I hope the links work. Please bear with me. :roll:
cwnlsl wrote:
I have a 300 and use it almost every day. Before I had a 7000 so there was some experience with the 7000 that softened the learning curve just a bit. The only advice I have for you is to start out with something less challenging than hummers. If I had started out with hummers, I would either thrown my beloved camera away or maybe have sold it. Try walking before you enter the 5 mile run
Charlotte