Northern Pintail, tipped up

 

As always, click on the photo to enlarge

A Northern Pintail (Anas acuta) displays its ornate dorsal feathering while grubbing food from the shallows of a Lake Ontario bay. Its namesake tail protrudes beyond its wing tips.

A side view of the same bird. The pintail is perhaps our most handsome fowl, at least among the dabbling ducks, and is quite the hardy beast. Although we were surprised to see this one lingering in the shadows of Toronto, on the northern shore of Lake Ontario. Its duckmates were mostly Greater Scaup, Long-tailed Ducks, White-winged Scoters and other tough fowl that winter in northerly climes.

This bird seemed healthy, and he was quite active and flew well. But he was also the only pintail, and most of his brethren would be far south of here by December 14, when I made these images.

The mug shot photo of our protagonist. Such a good-looking duck, and to me, a highlight of spring migration. Pintails push hard on the edge of ice out, and as thaws open up marshes, even in late February, in come scores of these "sprigs". Perhaps the Ohio best Ohio migratory hotspots are the western Lake Erie marshes, and the Killbuck Valley/Funk Bottoms wetlands complexes in Wayne County. Sometimes many thousands of pintail can be seen in a day.

The Long-tailed Ducks of Lake Ontario

 

As always, click the photo to enlarge

The view of downtown Toronto, from Tommy Thompson Park. Sometimes known as the "Leslie Street Spit", this place extends about three miles out into Lake Ontario. The park is a case of making lemonade from lemons. The origin of the "spit" is dredged material from the harbor, which began in 1959. Over the years, millions of cubic meters of dredge spoil were pumped into diked embayments, creating the "islands" that form the park. Over time, Tommy Thompson Park developed into a legendary birding site.

Shauna and I spent most of a day here, and the action came hot and heavy. Scads of waterfowl of many species use the surrounding lake and often offer great photo ops. It was a decent workout, too, as we ended up hiking 7.1 miles, armed with our heavy gear. It was worth every step, though.

A young Gray Birch (Betula populifolia) forest has sprung up in places. It was one of relatively few native plants that I noticed. I bet when Toronto experiences redpoll irruptions, this is a good place to be. The birch produces copious catkins, a favorite food source of redpolls.

Probably the coolest non-waterfowl bird that we saw was a Snowy Owl. It, unfortunately, was the victim of overzealous birders chasing it around and flushing it.

Three drake Long-tailed Ducks (Clangula hyemalis) land among a small flock. Some Common Goldeneyes (Bucephala clangula) are in the foreground.

We saw hundreds of Long-tailed Ducks from Tommy Thompson Park vantage points, maybe thousands. Evidence from aerial surveys suggest that as many as 700,000 Long-tailed Ducks winter on Lake Ontario. That's approaching 10% of the overall North American population, although the total population is just an estimate. Long-tailed Ducks are tough to get a handle on, due to their remote northerly nesting locations, and often difficult to access/survey wintering grounds.

A hen Long-tailed Duck swoops low over two Red-breasted Mergansers and three Common Goldeneye. Both of those species are also very common here.

Three drake Long-tailed Ducks lead a hen. This species is often very active, either feeding via long dives, scoot/flying short distances across the water to new feeding sites or just making rapid flights in small squadrons. One can often hear the baying of flocks from quite some distance.

Three hens drop into the water in near-perfect synchronicity. Tommy Thompson can be a goldmine for in-flight shots of waterfowl. I was using my Canon R5 and 800mm f/5.6 lens. The day before, I used the same rig but with the 1.4x teleconverter attached, for a focal reach of 1120mm. However, the addition of the teleconverter leads to more missed shots and reduces sharpness somewhat. In general, I've found that just using the bare 800mm delivers a noticeably higher rate of keepers, especially with fast-moving species such as waterfowl.

A hen Long-tailed Duck preens her feathers. I find that I often go for hen waterfowl first, in regard to picture-making. After all, everyone generally prioritizes males, so there is less imagery of the hens. Yet female ducks are often incredibly ornate in feather detailing and coloration. Long-tailed hens also have a lovely little wren-like tail.

A hen shows off one of her giant webbed feet. That foot is the size of her head. Long-tailed Ducks are known to dive to at least 215 feet (unfortunately, because that's the deepest that one has been caught in a deepwater fishing seine). But the undoubtedly can go deeper, perhaps much deeper. It takes big, webbed feet to dive to such depths.

Another view of a hen Long-tailed Duck, with her all-dark bill.

A young male, sporting its mostly pink bill. It was a treat to be able to watch so many Long-tailed Ducks and enjoy their calls and behavior. They're highly social and mixed flocks of adults of both sexes, along with juveniles, were the norm.

We hit about a dozen lakefront sites, from Grimsby, Ontario to Toronto. Just about all of them produced lots of birds, although good photographic opportunities varied from site to site. If I were to do another winter western Lake Ontario trip - which I will - and only had two full days - as we did on this trip - I'd likely just hit two spots. They'd be Fifty Point Conservation Area near Hamilton, where we had lots of action, and Tommy Thompson Park. But we always chat up locals and met many on this trip. They often have great ideas for places that weren't on our radar screen, so one should be ready to adapt plans based on new intel. But visits to Fifty Point and Tommy Thompson should yield oodles of cool photo ops.

Merlin, and the use of teleconverters

 

As always, click the photo to enlarge

A Merlin (Falco columbarius) perches high in the dead boughs of a spruce in Columbus's (Ohio) Union Cemetery. It was a frosty morning, with temps in the low 20's F with a noticeable wind chill. Shauna and I ran down here yesterday, with Merlins as the main target. The burly little falcons have been winter residents in this cemetery for a number of years, and two were conspicuous yesterday.

Because of the wind, most likely, the birds were at first sitting in more sheltered spots within the crowns of bushy deciduous trees. But it didn't take too long before they began hunting and shifted to prominent open perches near the tops of ornamental spruces. As always, they were fun to watch, with a bit of spirited play-fighting as one bird would strafe the other and short chases would ensue. We didn't have a lot of time to watch these Merlins, but I'll back again as Union Cemetery is only ten minutes or so from my house.

A grim reality of bird photography is more is better. And more, as in lens reach, also means more $$$. This can get fiendishly expensive. Basically, there's two groups of photography: bird photography, and everything else, when it comes to cost. The bare minimum reach for birds, to get consistently good results, is 500mm, in my opinion. But even that often falls short. My first big prime telephoto was Canon's remarkable 500 f/4 II. I took out a credit union loan to get it. Shortly thereafter I obtained a Canon 1.4x II teleconverter and that lens was rarely without it for the rest of my ownership. With the teleconverter attached, the lens had a focal range of 700mm and remained tack sharp. The only tangible downside is that it lost one stop, going from a wide-open f/4 to an f/5.6. Small price to pay and I got scads of great bird images over the years I owned that setup.

But it wasn't long before the lust for a bigger lens set in. I eventually sprung for my current workhorse, the Canon 800mm f/5.6, which I've had for many years now. And in the process, learned an important lesson. Buy used. Let someone else take the initial hit. That lens retailed for about $13,000 when I got mine, but I found a perfect used copy for $8,000. Still a lot of money but way less than new.

While the 800mm has its downsides, they are few and mostly dependent upon the users' physical fitness. The lens alone weighs about 10 lbs., and couple that with the camera and the sturdy tripod and head that is necessary, and you've got a hefty package to be lugging around. It's worth it for the incredible range that the lens offers, and it can be expanded upon with the aforementioned teleconverter. The 1.4x, mounted to the 800, offers a focal range of 1120 mm. And with good technique and proper settings, especially on a day with decent light, sharp images are easily obtained. The Merlin photo in this post was made with this setup. I should also note that 1120mm allows the operator to remain out of the sphere of disturbance of the subject. You are often just too far away to provoke angst.

Probably the biggest downside to the 800/1.4x teleconverter setup is the loss of one stop. The lens becomes an f/8, in the case of the 800mm. That's why the more natural light, the merrier. One could argue that teleconverter-created images are not quite as sharp as those without and that's probably mostly true, but if all is done well, sharpness issues are relatively inconsequential.

While I am a huge fan of large prime lenses, like my 800 and the 500 before it, and my 400's, great progress has been made in the world of much less costly zoom telephotos. In the infancy of my telephoto days, I experimented with both Sigma and Tamron zoom telephotos (I think they were 150mm-500mm). I wasn't a fan - slow focusing, much vignetting, lack of sharpness, although it should be noted that these were among their first efforts. But now, their telephotos are much improved, as are factory offerings from Canon and Nikon. Shauna shoots with a Nikon Z8 and is soon to take possession of a Nikon 180mm-600mm telephoto. We have heard great things about this lens and are eager to work with it. It's roughly $2,000. For comparison, Nikon's superb Z 600mm f/4 with built-in 1.4x teleconverter is about $15,000, new. We hope that the lesser Nikon lens works well with the teleconverter and otherwise and can make great bird images.

If you have a lens that functions with a teleconverter, acquiring a 1.4x is fairly inexpensive way to bolt on extra fire power. Your 500mm becomes a 700mm, 600mm an 840mm, etc. Do note the attendant loss of a stop, though.

As far as 2x teleconverters go, I'm generally not a fan and I have long had Canon's 2x and have played with it a fair bit. While the doubling of the lens's reach is alluring, the tradeoffs often negate the extra reach. In general, the lower the focal range of the lens, the better it works. My best results are on 300 and 400 lens, and with Canon's 400mm f/2.8 II it can work incredibly well. Note that two stops of light are lost with the 2x, though. Thus, my 400mm II becomes an 800mm at f/5.6, and why would I shoot with that when I have the 800mm f/5.6 prime which is razor sharp? Also, it can be very hard/impossible to get razor sharp images with the 2x teleconverter mounted in many situations where I would probably have success with the prime 800mm.

Bells's Vireo (Vireo bellii), shot with the Canon 400mm f/2.8 II lens, 

Canon 2x II teleconverter, and Canon 5DIV camera. No problems with sharpness here, but this is one of the few lenses that I've used that has a high level of functionality with the 2x. But in general, I wouldn't recommend 2x teleconverters for sharp high-quality imagery. However, 1.4x teleconverters - an emphatic yes.

A very cool lizard

 

As always, click the photo to enlarge

A Gold Dust Day Gecko (Phelsuma laticauda) peeks coyly at the photographer. Almost immediately upon arrival to our hosts' house on Maui in the little town of Paia, Shauna and I began to notice brown geckos in and around the gardens. While any gecko is cool - or any lizard at all - Marty and Eleanor told us to watch for a much flashier gecko and showed us where to keep an eye out for them.

It didn't take long to spot a GDDG, and we quickly wired up flashes and bolted on macro lenses to attempt imagery of the extraordinary beasts. The brilliantly hued geckos obliged, and I share a few of those photos here.

Like SO many organisms on Maui, the Gold Dust Day Gecko is not native. It hails from Madagascar and vicinity. As one might suspect from its appearance, this lizard is coveted in the pet trade and has been moved to many parts of the world. As usually happens with commonly kept reptiles, some escape, and where conditions are appropriate, they may flourish outside of captivity.

The Hawaiian Islands have no native terrestrial reptiles, although there are marine reptiles such as sea turtles and Yellow-bellied Sea Snakes. But now there are apparently eight species of established geckos, and at least nine other introduced reptile species. The much more frequent brown geckos that we saw may have been the Common House Gecko (Hemidactylus frenatus), although we did not capture images of those and attempt to verify its identity.

I don't know if geckos like the GDDG cause ecological issues, but I suspect not. At least where we saw them, and I suspect that this is true in most cases, they were inhabiting landscapes with nearly no native species - animals or plants. So, there is no native species for them to be competing with, by and large.

If the information that I found is correct, we can pinpoint the introduction of Gold Dust Day Gecko to Hawaii. A student at the University of Hawaii smuggled in eight of them in 1974 and released them near campus. It would seem likely that other independent releases also occurred, but whatever the case, the lizards stuck.