Cedar Waxwings in the Mill River behind my apartment, from 2010 and 2014. Waxwings are rather small birds—little more than half the size of robins. Their tails look like somebody dipped them in yellow paint, and young males and older birds have waxy red tips on the ends of their wing feathers. Click the picture above to see more photos.
Waxwings eat berries year-round, but during breeding season they also eat insects. Around here, they perch on branches beside the river and make quick dashing runs over the water, snatching unlucky bugs out of the air. In 2010, when I got my first digital SLR camera, I took photos of waxwings in flight as they were busy flycatching. Not an easy thing to photograph! They move so fast it's impossible to follow them through the camera's viewfinder. I resorted to keeping both eyes open and trying to keep the viewfinder window aligned over the bird as seen with the other eye—while holding the shutter button down in rapid-fire mode. The result was many frames with nary a bird in the picture, but a few with a flying bird somewhere in the frame. Click the picture above to see lots more in-flight photos.
Tech Notes: The in-flight photos were taken with an 8-megapixel Canon 30D camera using a 55-250mm lens, with the focus pre-set to mid-river distance. The stationary bird photos were taken with the camera attached to a Televue 85 telescope working as a 600mm telephoto lens. The first half of the stationary collection was shot with the 30D and the second half, from 2014, with a 24-megapixel Nikon D3200 camera. These days, 8 megapixels seems like nothing, but the photos from the old 30D look quite nice (if not quite as detailed) compared to the ones from the newer camera. Images processed using Affinity Photo.
