Cardinalis cardinalis is featured in today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #120 is:

Danielle and I love cardinals. We love how bright red they are, their “masks”, their mohawks, and the way they hop around on the ground. The funniest thing about cardinals is that they try to act tough with the smaller birds, but the cardinals are the first birds to run/fly away whenever something scary happens. And they’re the last birds to come back to eat.

Once again to Chicago for this Top 200 Photo.

photo #134 is:

I now know this is a red-winged blackbird. At the time I just thought it was an awesome-looking bird that let me get really close to it for a photo. The most unsettling aspect of this photo is that the beak doesn’t hinge where it seems that it should so I think it looks creepy.

A bird in this Top 200 Photo.

photo #168 is:

This is one of my best bird photos both from a subject standpoint and a technical standpoint. Birds are exceptionally hard to photograph. All animals are hard as they’re more unpredictable than humans, but birds are exceptionally frantic. It’s probably partly because they have a few predators and partly because they need to constantly eat because of their high metabolisms. So it’s hard to capture a bird tack sharp like this one. It’s made a little harder by the fact that my camera’s old so I can’t boost the ISO high enough to get a nice, fast shutter speed.

It was busy at the bird feeders with all the new birds. This little guy was unable to find a spot to land. I don’t know what he didn’t like about the bottom peg.

In case you’ve been under a rock lately, Maryland, DC, and Virginia got rocked by a huge El Niño system over the weekend. It dumped over three feet of snow in my neighborhood and nearly three feet everywhere else. The birds weathered it pretty well. Well, it helps that I felt bad for them and kept refilling the bird feeders. They were especially aggressive on the feeders this weekend for two reasons. 1) It was cold and they needed food to heat themselves by moving and 2) We had a bunch of new, large birds join the crowds in my backyard. The new birds included Red-Winged Blackbirds, Common Grackles, and European Starlings. Neither of these birds like Sunflower seeds, so they all kept going after the bird feed mix feeders. When I ran out of bird feed mix (a few days later) and was unable to buy any because of the snow conditions, I filled the feeders with sunflower seeds and they remained untouched for most of the day until the birds figured out that’s all they were going to get. Then they finished that off. I’ll be interested to see if they stick around after conditions improve.

Sometimes the simplest things in life give the best pleasure. I love watching animals do the things they do. I pass by this lake chock-full of geese every day on my way to work. They’re only there in the morning before they go out in search of food and whatever it is geese do during the day. I wanted to catch them when the lake was frozen over to see how they dealt with it. Basically, they mostly treated it as though the shore extended out onto the lake. I shot at least a hundred frames and put up my best few onto flickr. This one became my favorite shot of the day.

Here’s the calendar for February.  Click on it to get the full size so you can make it your background.  ( edit:  I noticed a bug in the way the calendar appeared and fixed it on 31 Jan 2010 so just download a new version, thanks!)

For square screens:

[caption id=“attachment_3145” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Feb 2010 - 1024x768 calendar (fixed)”] [/caption]

For wide screens:

[caption id=“attachment_3146” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Feb 2010 - 1680x1050 calendar (fixed)”] [/caption]

This Northern Mockingbird is one of the many birds in my yard.  I can’t quite pinpoint what it is about birds that fascinate Danielle and I, but we love to watch them cavorting around the yard and interacting with each other.

I was reading Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography books when he suggested making a background calendar to get my photos out there.  A lot of people at work like to have these types of backgrounds and I follow another photographer/blogger that does the same.  Here’s my January 2010 calendar.  To make these your background, click on the photo and then right-click and click on “set as my background” if you’re using Windows.  Linux and Mac users should be technical enough to be able to figure out what they need to do for their specific situation.

Another hard bird to photograph.  The blue jays are in my yard even less often than the cardinals.  And they run away at the slightest move by me.  But, once again, patience paid off.

Dealing with the snow by being inactive as possible.

Ever since I put up the bird feeders (and even before that) I’ve been trying to get good shots of the cardinal.  With my Sigma 120-400mm and some patience I was finally able to succeed.  These guys are really skittish.  If I come outside when I see them, they run away.  So I need to already be standing out there for them to ignore me and come out and let me take their photo.  This photo has been increasing in views rather quickly.  I’m a pretty big fan of it myself.

This is from last weekend.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“From my backyard. Captured with my brand new 120-400mm lens.”] [/caption]

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“A new bird joins the crowd in my backyard”] [/caption]

It’s been nearly a month since I put up the bird feeders in our house and I have been enjoying them nearly every day since then.  In fact, the only negative has been the cost of bird food.  But, as my mother-in-law put it, I get the benefits of having birds without the hassle of having them as pets.  At first we had a few birds visiting the feeders each day.  Now, during the busy bird breakfast hours, we get multiple birds at once.  Interestingly, on the whole, the birds to not fight with each other.  Rather, if there are more birds than spots at the feeder, they will queue up on nearby branches.  I was very surprised by this behaviour because I thought they would surely fight over this nearly infinite food source.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“375” caption=“Just barely beat the sun getting our bird feeders up on the first day”] [/caption]

Almost since we moved into our house we’ve been fascinated by the birds we have seen in our front and back yards.  Both the wife and I love birding in general and I love photographing birds.  So, after a bit of discussion we decided to get a bird feeder.  We ended up getting two of them to accommodate different birds and different seed types.  Then I dug a hole and attached the bird feeders to a stick we had in the garage.  I read a few books on birds and expected it might take a while for the birds to discover the feeder.  I was extremely delighted the following day to find birds at the feeder when I got home from work!  These little guys would flit out of the woods, peck a bite, and fly right back out.  So it was very hard to get a photo, especially with the sun beginning to set.  At the end of this post is the best shot I got.

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“333” caption=“Need me to dig a hole for you?”] [/caption]

Going over photos that were moving from one views group to another on flickr, I discovered this photo that I really love.  I love how his head is cocked, I love the idea of a bird with a built-in shovel, and I love how sharp the photo came out.

A while back in time (but only two posts ago) I wrote about my first bike ride on the BWI trail. A few days later I got an email on Facebook:

My name is Marty and I happened along your BLOG about biking at the BWI trail. My first time riding the trail was Saturday June 20th and I had the same incident with the bird. Not sure if we did the loop the same way but I was going pretty fast when the bird hit me. It was my first ride in about 10 years, no helmet and I was going pretty fast …………. THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO LOSE IT!!!