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Posts Tagged ‘Poecile atricapillus’

This tiny chickadee was energetically digging into a cattail last week at Huntley Meadows Park. Although it is usually recommended not to photograph subjects mid-bite (at least human ones), I like the way this shot turned out of the industrious little bird.

Judging from the range maps, this is probably a Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis), although we sometimes also get Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus). These two types of chickadees look quite similar and I am not yet skilled in distinguishing between them.

chickadee

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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My little chickadee—spotted yesterday afternoon in the cattails at Huntley Meadows Park. In our area, most of the chickadees are Carolina Chickadees (Poecile carolinensis), but we do get some Black-capped Chickadees (Poecile atricapillus) too. The species are so similar that I am never completely sure which one I am looking at. This one, for example, looks like some of the images that I see of the Black-capped Chickadee.

When it came to presenting this image, I was a little bothered by the large amount of negative space on the left side. However, I really like the way that the image emphasizes the tallness of the cattail. The more I looked at the image, the more I grew to like the composition, so I ended up not cropping it at all.

chickadee

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved.

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Borrowing a longer telephoto lens earlier this week,  I was able to get some shots of the tiny birds that I often see, but rarely am able to photograph.

On Monday, my photography mentor, Cindy Dyer, lent me a Nikon D300 with a Nikon 80-400mm lens. It was a lot of fun to experiment with a much longer telephoto than I am accustomed to using. We spent only a limited time at a local nature center, so I did not have a chance to photograph anything too exotic, but I did get some shots of a Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens), a Black-capped Chickadee (Poecile atricapillus),  and a Tufted Titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor).

The background in the first image really grabbed my attention when I pulled up the image on the computer—the tree branches look an awful lot like a suspension bridge.

I included the blurry final image of the chickadee flying away just for fun. I get this kind of image on a regular basis, although usually the bird is out of the frame. The Nikon I was using has a much higher frame rate (up to 7 images a second) than my Canon (a more modest three frames a second), so the chickadee is still in the frame.

I am pretty sure that I will stick with Canon and not switch to Nikon, but, as fellow blogger Lyle Krahn predicted, I am starting to hear the siren call of a longer lens.

Downy Woodpecker lorez

Chickadee 2 lorezTuftedTitmouse lorez

feeder_blogBlurryBird lorez

© Michael Q. Powell. All rights reserved

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