I spent a bit of time yesterday afternoon watching and photographing the sparrow family that has taken residence in the little bird house up under my back patio. The three baby sparrows are coming along nicely and the parents are very attentive. It’s quite a joy to have them living in such close proximity.
Bird house compliments of Mr. Giovanny G.
I photographed this great blue heron along The Woodlands Waterway during my recent visit to the Houston area. It’s amazing to me that a bird so large and so ungainly is able to take flight.
It’s official… we’re now a full day into spring here in the northern hemisphere. We had a big snowstorm in the Denver metro area on our last day of winter and I got a kick out of watching the robins huddled in the leafless trees. Don’t they have anywhere to go to get out of the elements? You’d think that they would somehow KNOW that the Denver area is not the ideal place to be this time of year.
The robin pictured below kept sliding off the slippery twig in his quest to reach the berries on the end.
I love watching and photographing birds in my backyard. It’s always fun to see a new kind of bird in my yard that I’ve not seen there before. I’ll run for the bird book, wildly flipping through pages until I’m able to identify it. “It’s a spotted towhee!”
There are a number of things you can do to attract birds to your yard. Putting out feeders is one of the best things you can do. Different birds are attracted to different types of bird food, so put out a variety of seeds and suet, as well as a hummingbird feeder, to attract a greater variety of birds. Not all types of birds will eat at a feeder, so make sure you think about the ground feeders as well.
House Sparrow
Another great tactic is to put up a bird bath or some sort of water feature. Watching birds splash around in the water is very entertaining and makes for some great photos.
American Robins at the bird bath
The best time of the day for backyard bird photography, in my experience, is in the morning. Not only is that when the birds seem to be most plentiful, but that’s when your best light occurs. Late afternoon is a good time too. You’ll tend to see a greater variety of birds during the spring migration.
The key to getting great photos of your backyard birds is to get close. However, birds are skittish and will scatter at the first sign of movement. What to do? The best thing to do is have a nice long zoom lens on your camera. If you have a DSLR, a minimum of 200mm, but preferably 300mm or longer, is necessary. If you have a point-and-shoot, the higher the x-factor the better (i.e. 10x optical zoom). Some of those point-and-shoots can zoom in pretty close and get great shots. If you don’t have super zoom capabilities, just make sure you shoot at the highest resolution possible so you can get a good crop.
Black-billed Magpie with lunch
Another trick to getting close is setting up a feeder or bird bath fairly close to a window. As long as the window is reasonably clean and there’s no glare, you can get great shots through a window.
Since birds move quickly, it’s a really good idea to use a tripod if possible and shoot at a fast shutter speed.
My all-time favorite place for backyard bird photography is my dad and step-mom’s yard in the high desert of Globe, Arizona. They get an amazing variety of birds coming through and the quail are especially delightful to watch. Following are a few photos I’ve taken during visits to Globe:
Female Gambel's Quail
House Finch
Curve-billed Thrasher
Cactus Wren
Male Gambel's Quail
The very best advice I have to offer about backyard bird photography is this: Be patient.
For additional information about attracting birds to your backyard, check out the National Audubon Society’s book North American Birdfeeder Handbook (which has great information even if you don’t live in North America). 
I also highly recommend getting a good bird identification book appropriate to the area where you live.
I recently promised bee eaters… bee eaters you shall have.
As I mentioned previously, there wasn’t a whole ton of natural beauty to be found in Iraq, at least not in the parts I was seeing. (Incidentally, the far northern part of Iraq is actually quite lovely – I’ve seen some wonderful pictures – so if you ever plan on vacationing there, you might think about sticking to the northern areas). One day, as I was riding around on the military base that was my home for a couple of years, I caught a fleeting glimpse of a bird that had the most incredibly beautiful colors, like a parrot, but I knew very well that there weren’t any parrots in Iraq. A perusal of the internet revealed that the bird in question was a European bee eater (Merops apiaster). About a year later, I captured these photos of European bee eaters near our camp:
European Bee Eater, Kirkuk, Iraq
Bee Eater Pair, Kirkuk, Iraq
I like birds almost as much as I like rocks so will inevitably be posting bird photos here from time to time. I really need a longer lens to get REALLY good bird photos, though, like one of THESE. If you’d care to contribute to the “Help Laurie Buy a Ridiculously Long and Expensive Lens So She Can Take Better Bird Photos Fund,” let me know. 
An interesting (though perhaps only to me) sidenote: While I was looking on the web for information about European bee eaters (like… they can eat hundreds of bees a day and are seen as pests by beekeepers), I found a website that is using the second bee eater photo above without permission or credit. I might actually be flattered if the person who “borrowed” the photo hadn’t gone to the trouble of cropping the credit OUT of the original photo. Interesting. I’ll have to do something about that. And that just gave me fodder for a future blog post.
