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Photographing Hummingbirds

Tuesday, March 24, 2015 6:27

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Here’s The Situation at Toro Amarillo Hummingbird Garden. Lots of feeders hanging everywhere. Birds waiting their turns, birds feeding on the abundant plantings.

You can take photos of birds visiting feeders, but in the end, they’re photos of a magical bird sitting on a much less than magical piece of red plastic.

So upon arriving at any hummingbird garden, I go all googly eyed like everybody else, but I wait to photograph any birds until I figure out where they’re hanging out when they’re not at the feeders.

The black-bellied hummingbird fascinated me. I searched in vain for any color on its front. Nope. This bird is like yin to every other hummer’s yang.

It’s the ultimate black. Just black. None blacker. And a cool little crew-cut flattop hairdo that captivated me. Kind of a concept bird.

There’s a very nice bit of copper in its secondaries and the base of its primaries that flashes in flight, and the requisite metallic green on its back. And a huge dash of white in the tail, always a surprise in any hummingbird.

The endemic coppery-headed emerald was here, too, showing its coppery tail, which confused me more than once. With 53 species of hummingbirds in Costa Rica, I figured there must be a coppery-tailed emerald out there somewhere. Brain scramble is a common problem when birding here.

We wound up with a trip total of 26 hummingbird species, which was pretty awesome. We could easily have billed this trip solely as a hummingbird safari, but there was oh so much more.

One of the 26 was the green-crowned brilliant.

Brilliants remind me of little dragons coated in glittering mail.

Lights off…

Lights on! with a sapphire at his throat.

I adore the scaly breast of the female green-crowned brilliant. Very fetching.
Purple-throated mountaingems were buzzing about. I get kind of excited about the tiny hummingbirds, because they’re usually really interesting.

I played with composition, trying to decide whether I preferred vertical

or horizontal treatment of this female purple-throated mountaingem.

Her dashing mate was much harder to catch, and I got only a whisper of his purple throat. But the white postocular stripe gives him away.

Photographing hummingbirds is like an addictive video game. You’re always trying to better your last outing. There is no perfect hummingbird shot. But you sure wind up with a lot of them! Next time…

Julie Zickefoose is a painter and writer who lives on a nature sanctuary in Appalachian Ohio. She is the author of Letters from Eden and The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds With Common Birds, due in spring 2012. http://juliezickefoose.blogspot.com

Source: http://juliezickefoose.blogspot.com/2015/03/photographing-hummingbirds.html

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