Fast food for songbirds

It’s been a while since my last post, summer in Cork city is not generally the best time to photograph big birds, and small birds tend to be hard to approach. The feeder in the garden however has remained in constant use. Mostly it is populated by chaffinches but great tits, blue tits, coal tits, house sparrows, starlings, wood pigeons, collared doves, magpies, jackdaws, robins, blackbirds and song trushes also approach on occasion.

With this in mind I decided to stand the camera outside in the garden with a lead to my laptop inside so that I could take photos remotely without scaring the birds. The pitfall of course is that autofocus (though accessible through my software) doesn’t really work on fast moving songbirds, so it can take a while for a bird to sit at just the right distance. To add to the experiment I then worked in some software that acts as a remote sensor so that I wouldn’t have to be constantly present, it works great! Below are some of my results. With any luck I will capture some of the newly fledged younglings next week!