This winter’s finch invasion continues. I had fun watching both Evening and Pine Grosbeaks at the Sax-Zim Bog Welcome Center this morning, but struck out while hiking / listening for Black-Backed Woodpeckers at Winterberry Bog. I can never get enough of Evening Grosbeaks, When I was a young child these birds religiously invaded our Duluth yard every winter. In ten years at my own Duluth home I have never had a single one of these yellow birds … bummer.
Recently I created a couple of northern Minnesota birding excursion pamphlets (PDF’s) for a friend who manages the South Pier Inn (he wants the PDF’s for his guests). The work was done as a favor; thus I want my own readers to have the opportunity to utilize my work: (all three docs are PDF’s)
- Finding Snowy Owls in Superior
- A Birding Excursion to Sax-Zim Bog (download also the accompanying map)
Finally I would like to answer two questions submitted by some readers …
- Marla asks: Out of curiosity what are you using to organize your photos?
I actually do not use any service, be it Flicker, SmugMug, GooglePhotos, etc. There are a number of reasons.
-
- I like to be in charge of my own images and MANY services downgrade your image quality upon upload.
- My images (actually every file new or edited on my entire hard drive) are backed up nightly to an external hard drive
- I use basic naming conventions for ease of search via my hard drive.
- Images are saved in folders with logical names (such as Night Skies)
- My filenames always include a geographic reference, a bird ID (or descriptive name such as ship, freighter, or ore boat), and finally any other relevant important information (such as flight, take-off, prey, dawn, seasmoke, etc). Thus my filenames can get rather long but ave keywords that facilitate searches.
- Tommy asks: I like my camera but find the wifi is inoperative I in controlling shots from iPhone to assist with feeder pictures. Do you have any comments on that?
-
- While I use a different camera than Tommy, I do “not” use wifi and any accompanying camera manufacturer apps to control the taking of photographs. There are a number of reasons:
- Wifi usage by a camera is a real battery life hog. Living in a cool climate such as northern Minnesota insures I pay attention to this fact.
- Anytime I actually tested a “wifi shutter release” I found the latency to be extremely slow. Thus, using wifi controls not only negatively affected my battery life, but also meant missed photo opportunities. By the time I pressed “shutter release” in an app, and the connection was passed along to my camera’s shutter release by wifi or bluetooth, the action I wanted to record was long in the past.
- I prefer to sit or kneel near bird feeders or in gardens (never stand … birds find that action threatening but may put up with you given the lower profile of sitting or kneeling).
- While I use a different camera than Tommy, I do “not” use wifi and any accompanying camera manufacturer apps to control the taking of photographs. There are a number of reasons:
Many thanks for sharing your wealth of information. I hope to visit the Bog again someday and this will surely help.