Neotropic Cormorant – Two Views

Neotropic Cormorant

Nikon D300, 300/2.8 AF-S plus TC20E III (2x), ISO 800, 1/640th second at f/8, 4/4/2012

As a beginning birder back in New Jersey I didn’t pay a lot of attention to cormorants. They didn’t seem all that attractive: they’d either swim away and dive out of sight, or they’d line up on a distant sandbar to dry their wings. The default species was Double-crested, while in winter we could find a few Great Cormorants from “across the pond” mixed in. But to me they were pretty much  ungainly dark birds seen at a distance.

Moving to the southwest made cormorants interesting again since I had the chance to add another species to my life list – the Neotropic Cormorant. It was one of the first species I chased to see when it was reported at Patagonia Lake State Park about three hours south of Phoenix. That was in 1994. Now the Neotropic Cormorant has displaced the Double-crested from most places around Phoenix, including the Gilbert Water Ranch where I do a lot of my photography and these two images were made.

And now that I spend a lot more time with each bird and less time chasing check-marks for my list I am able to appreciate cormorants for their own beauty and ways. In good light (like the first image) the characteristic sharp point to the back of the beak can be seen as well as the white border – these are instant indicators that this is a Neotropic and not a Double-crested. The light reveals that this cormorant isn’t just a dark blob, and the colored ripples help give interest to the water.

Neotropic Cormorant

Nikon D300, 300/2.8 AF-S plus TC20E III (2x), ISO 400, 1/1000th second at f/5.6, 5/7/2012

This second image shows a Neotropic Cormorant on a favorite roost – a bare branch of a large tree where up to a couple dozen cormorants can be seen at times. This image shows the long tail characteristic of the species, but unless it is seen with a Double-crested it isn’t obviously longer on its own.

For more views of this species use the search box on this blog to locate previous posts featuring them – all from the Gilbert Water Ranch.

Mourning Dove Moire

Mourning Dove

Nikon D70, Nikkor 300/2.8 AF-S lens with TC20E (2x), ISO 200, 1/640th second at f/9, -1/3rd stop ev, tripod

I recently decided to rework a Mourning Dove image from 2005, taken with my first digital camera about 6 months after I started using it. I’ve liked this since I shot it and plan to use it in a “weekly challenge” web site with a monochrome theme.

I like the unusual perch (a bit of granite beside a lake in Tucson, AZ), I like the open beak, and I like the “understated” colors.

What I don’t like about the image (although I find it fascinating) is the small area of red and green that shows up on the wings. Here is the area as a 1:1 crop from the image viewed at 100% in photoshop.

Moire example

I think is is the phenomenon known as moire – an interference pattern created from two overlapping patterns with very close spacial frequency. In this case it is the horizontal and vertical fine detail of the feather that is almost the same spacial frequency as the photosites on the sensor in the Nikon D70. This is one of the technical issues of digital capture, and camera manufacturers deal with it by overlaying an anti aliasing filter on the sensor. A strong filter will keep moire patterns from occurring, but at a tradeoff in image sharpness. Camera designers juggle this tradeoff with varying outcomes.

Nikon has just released the impressive Nikon D800, along with the D800e that excludes an anti aliasing filter for maximum sharpness. It remains to be seen how much of a problem moire will be in real world imaging. It might be that Nikon has provided a way to deal with this in their raw conversion application Nikon Capture, but I’ve not seen anything about it at ther review websites yet.

Note that this is the only time I’ve seen this effect in thousands of nature images I’ve shot on digital with the D70, D200, and D300.

House Sparrows

House Sparrow male

Nikon D300, 300/2.8 AF-S Nikkor plus TC20E III (2x), ISO 400, 1/100th second @ f/8, spot meter, 4/4/12 8:32 am

House Sparrows are not native to the United States, but they’ve been here so long that they are part of our ecosystem and are seen in most places. They are a pest to native species because they displace them from scarce nesting cavities – the lead image shows a male House Sparrow that has moved into a Saguaro cactus cavity excavated by a Gila Woodpecker at the Gilbert Water Ranch.

House Sparrow female

Nikon D300, 300/2.8 AF-S Nikkor plus TC20E III (2x), ISO 400, 1/100th second @ f/8, matrix meter, 4/10/12 6:44 am

House Sparrows have am affinity for humans and are most often encountered around buildings or other places frequented by people such as parks. This female is perching on a bench overlooking one of the ponds at the Gilbert Water Ranch.

House Sparrow at water

Nikon D200, 300/2.8 AF-S Nikkor plus TC20E (2x), ISO 800, 1/60th second @ f/8, spot meter, 3/14/06 5:29 pm

House Sparrows can be confusing for novice birders. Although they are named as sparrows they aren’t really related to the native sparrows of North America and are more closely related tot he weaver finches of Africa. Following normal classifications they are located at the back of field guides rather than with the real sparrows and can be hard to locate for someone not knowing this.. More experienced birders tend to ignore them as too common and uninteresting. But they can make interesting photo subjects given their availability.

Random Ranch Photos

Orange-crowned Warbler

Nikon D300, AF-S 300/2.8 plus TC20E III (2x), ISO 800, 1/200th second at f/8, 2/29/2012

Other pressures on my time have kept me from processing recent photos and from making posts to this blog, so I’ve grabbed three random images from the Gilbert Water Ranch for a quick entry.

Orange-crowned Warbler is a fairly common bird in winter around Phoenix, although not as common as the ubiquitous Yellow-rumped Warbler. They don’t show themselves as openly as the yellow-rumps do, but at least when they do they don’t move around quite as actively. This was taken at the same time and place as this previously posted Ruby-crowned Kinglet while I stood in a brush tangle near an inflow to one of the ponds. It would be a better image if the small leaves didn’t block the tail and it the perch didn’t branch right in front of the warbler. When you shoot wild birds in random encounters it helps to have a higher tolerance for some imperfections.

Anna's Hummingbird

Nikon D300, AF-S 300/2.8 plus TC20E III (2x), ISO 400, 1/500th second at f/11, 1/31/2012

Anna’s Hummingbird is the default hummer at the Water Ranch, present there in good numbers fall through spring. In summer the Black-chinned Hummingbirds displace Anna’s. In winter there are occasional sightings of Costa’s, and in migration there can be Broad-tailed and Rufous as well.

It takes the proper direction of light to illuminate the colorful gorget on male hummers; without it the entire throat can appear black as in this image. The light here is rather harsh, and the image was taken in late morning (at 9:50 am). This is much later than my usual time at the Water Ranch – this is the day that the gates were locked and I was forced to another entry point only to find out that I couldn’t get out where I planned and had to take a much longer walk to reach my car.

Rabbit

Nikon D300, AF-S 300/2.8 plus TC20E III (2x), ISO 800, 1/160th second at f/8, 2/29/2012

When I’m not working the birds I try to keep myself open to other subjects and opportunities. There are plenty of rabbits at the Water Ranch now that there are fewer feral cats, and occasionally I’ll point the camera down instead of up to capture one. This was taken the same day as the Orange-crowned Warbler at the top of this post.

Two from Boyce Thompson Arboretum

Red-naped Sapsucker

Nikon D70, 300/2.8 plus TC20E, tripod, SB-800 flash, ISO 400, 1/60th second at f/5.6, 2/23/2008

Most of the images I post here are from the Gilbert Water Ranch: not surprising as I spend so much time there walking about looking for birds and taking photos when the opportunity arises. Although I don’t get nearly as many photos from Boyce Thompson Arboretum (an AZ state park near Superior, AZ) I enjoy my less frequent visits there at least as much as my times at the Water Ranch.

Boyce offers a different habitat mix than does the Water Ranch and as a result the species I see there are often different. I find it more difficult to shoot at Boyce because there’s so much more vegetation for the fewer birds to hide in, but if it was closer I’d spend a lot more time there trying for photos.

Red-naped Sapsucker is a woodpecker of higher elevations that spends the winter in the trees at Boyce. I’ve only seen one at the Water Ranch (April 2007). My only photos of the species are from Boyce. In preparing a program for the Arboretum I rediscovered this shot from 2008. It was taken with my first digital camera, the Nikon D70, and the shadowed position of the sapsucker led me to use fill flash. I hadn’t been excited by the image when I first processed it in 2008, but when I revisited it recently I decided it was worth a rework and I’m much happier with the results seen here.

Hermit Thrush

Nikon D300, 300/2.8 plus TC20E III (2x), Gitzo 1325 tripod, RRS BH-55 head, Sidekick, ISO 1600, 1/320th second at f/8, 1/23/2012

Hermit Thrush is another bird from the higher elevations that can be found wintering at Boyce every year. I’ve never seen it at the Water Ranch, although a friend has seen it there. This shot was taken 4 years and 2 cameras later than the sapsucker (but with the same lens and probably the same tripod setup). I could not have taken this shot with the D70, nor the D200 that came after it, because neither of those two earlier cameras preforms well at the high ISO 1600 setting. And until I took this shot I didn’t know how much better the D300 was than the D200. With the D70 I would have needed to use flash and put up with the unnatural look it would have given. With the D200 I would have tried this at ISO 800, opened the lens to f/5.6, and tried to use Noise Reduction software in post processing to clean up the results. But the newer technology of the D300 overcame those problems, and neither flash nor noise reduction was needed.