Bird Flash
House finch showing its under-feathers
This house finch was doing a classic bird-on-a-wire, and then started bobbing a bit, indicating it was going to take flight. (The more time I spend watching the birds closely, the more I can read their actions.)
So I took a sequence of shots to capture the movement. They are in the gallery of images below.
Photos taken with the new Sony A9 III and the Sony 300mm lens.
The birds that come to our back porch typically launch away from me (the big beastly human), so the wire is typically between me and the bird when they start to fly. But the fact is that birds don’t ‘just fly’—they jump, and despite the wing flashes in this case (I’m assuming a young bird for that reason), they often keep their wings tucked to pick up speed for the flight. Like this:
Not a very glamorous photo, but I thought I’d share the one to show what I deal with. One really has to take some time ‘in the saddle’ to learn how the birds behave so you can get good shots. The challenge in these cases is to react quickly enough to the bird’s jump to then follow it with the camera until it is flying with wings extended. The little buggers are super-fast, and so far my success rate is very very low. ;) I’m working on that.
The new camera, the A9 III helps. My success rate was about 0.1%; now it’s much better, about 2% successful follow shots…