Anna’s Hummingbirds
This week, I finally decided that if I couldn’t go to the parks I love right now due to the shelter-in-place restrictions, I would have to look for wildlife closer to home. There are many birds and occasional raccoons around my apartment complex, but hummingbirds recently caught my attention with their delicate flashes of color and rapid wingbeats.
If you’ve seen hummingbirds in the wild, you know they’re so tiny and fast they’re almost impossible to photograph in flight. I decided to narrow the odds by bringing them to me. The first step was to buy a hummingbird feeder, which was simple enough. Initially, I purchased some feed from a store. The instructions told me how to dissolve it in water to create bright red nectar.
I hung the feeder on our deck, and within twenty minutes, multiple hummingbirds investigated it. Almost immediately, though, someone got in touch via Instagram to tell me the dye they put in the powder is potentially harmful to the birds. I did some research, and while the evidence wasn’t as clear-cut as I’d have liked, I didn’t want to harm any birds. I found a simple recipe online and made my own nectar. Basically, you need to boil four parts of water with one part sugar for a couple of minutes, stir until the sugar dissolves, and let it cool.
Over the next few days, I experimented with a few techniques to photograph the birds, which I soon identified as Anna’s hummingbirds. I captured many out-of-focus images for every decent photo, or worse, empty sky. I could photograph them on the feeder, but that was boring; I wanted them in flight! The combination that seemed to work best was the camera on a tripod, focused on the feeder but angled to the side. Whenever a bird appeared, it would hover briefly before landing or takeoff, and with a burst of images, I started to get lucky. I used a high ISO to increase the shutter speed and removed some grain with Topaz DeNoise.
Over the last week or two, I’ve started to identify the four birds that come to the feeder most often. Unfortunately, a male lives in the gum tree across the road and is very territorial. Whenever a bird that’s not his mate comes for a drink, he swoops in and chases it. That makes things even more challenging, and I’m still trying to get a good image of him, but this project has been a fun distraction.
