Some interesting things to note about bird watching recently.
New Bird Species
In addition to a new species of bird - straw headed bulbul, 200th bird species on my bird watching list, whose chirps intrigued me for a few years, I added two more new species to my list since.
One was Asian openbill stork, which I saw and identified on Thursday evening, during the beautiful sunset at Echo lake. I saw this waterfowl before, but mistaken it as juvenile painted stork.
Asian Openbill Stork
Another bird of mistaken identity from me was Yellow bittern, which I thought was nigh heron for some time, even though I noticed that it was somewhat different from night heron. On Thursday, yes, the same day as that for Asian Openbill Stork, I used Google lens to check its identity, and found out what it really was.
yellow bittern
These two are 201th, 202th bird on my list respectively.
Admittedly these two birds are not new even to me, I just mistaken them as other birds. The true new birds species are Common Hoopoe, and Straw-Headed Bulbul.
It was raining on Chinese New Year's day. I heard bird chirps and looked from my window, and spotted a few blue throated bee eaters. I saw the birds before quite a few times but not around my home. I took out my big lens and captures a few interesting photos. With the big lens, I took sharp and high resolution photos of the bird!
One photo showed two blue throated next to each other, seems to be double vision of the camera. In fact, it was purely a coincident. I was trying to have a flying bird and a perching bird in the same photo, and pushed the shutter release button a fraction of a second late!
Blue throated bee eater - look carefully, you might see streaks of rain drops
Double vision?
Photography technique improvement
Using continuous shooting for moving object is a common practice and I can now use it intuitively. Here is a gif made from continuous shootings
Manual focus was a technique I practiced on at home. I got a chance to use the technique at the moment of the need.
A couple weeks ago, when we walked at Echo lake area, I saw a couple of photographers aimed there cameras at an area with fallen leaves. One person told me there were two night jars in the area. One was close to the trail path, the other was deep into the woods, and hard to focus on. After a few tries, I decided to use manual focus, and got a good shot! I was very pleased with the outcome, and pad myself on the back.
