Taking Flight
Airplanes, birds, rockets--it's all the same thing, right?
Flight is a tricky business. It helps to have wings, although they are not strictly necessary if you have a big enough propeller and motor.
What amazes me about birds is the same thing that amazes me about humans: flying can be so ordinary a thing. You jump off a branch and you are flying; you pay too much for a lumpy, narrow, crowded seat and your flying as well.
The human experience of flight may have once been extraordinary. But now we fly the way birds fly: just to get from here to there.
Birds take flight for granted, along with the grace and power that comes with it. Flickers, like ducks, have an abundance of thick feathers; they are something like a flying down pillow. (Hey, yeah, I get it: down is feathers. So more literal than literary. Sue me.)
But enough nonsense. I’ve been working for quite a while to get good shots of the local flickers. They are very shy; if they come to the deck, and I head outside, they are gone before I’m out the door. If I wait outside with the camera for an hour, I probably won’t see one; they come by now and then, not every day.
So imagine my surprise when I went outside with the camera to just take some photos of the birds around our feeders, and there was a Flicker sitting in the red maple. It was not a good shot; even though the leaves were all gone, there were plenty of branches to get in the way of a good shot. And then he jumps to a branch where I can get a nice shot, and I aim and wait patiently, hoping he’ll fly. And that if he flies, he won’t be obscured by branches, or move so fast that I don’t get the shot.
I got the shot. Yay! Happy day.
Which put me in a mood to get more shots of birds taking flight.
A lot of chickadees visit our feeder. They like to hang out in the branches of the pear tree near the feeder. In the winter, that gives me a clear shot. So I set the camera to high speed picture taking, and got the shot above (one of about 50; the Sony A9 III can take a lot of shots in a very short period of time).
You may be thinking: so where did the flicker fly to? He flew toward me, figured out I must be some kind of menace, and banked right to fly down to our Golden Chain tree, where he tucked himself in between the branches.
There’s a slight softness to the photo; a couple of trees are way, way out of focus in that shot. It reduces the contrast, but it also has a nice effect on the photo—it softens it a little bit.
Above, another bird taking flight in the pear tree: a Towhee. I love their deep red eyes.
Some nice shots, I particularly like the Towhee. Love that the eye is so red and clear!