I’m a birder, now.

July 12, 2024

In May, I decided to dump an inordinate amount of money into purchasing a camera and telephoto lens.

Carter throws up a peace sign next to a camera and telephoto lens, which is wrapped in camouflage — me n my setup: a Sony A6700, 200-600 mm lens, and hat with a western tanager *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

Since then, I have taken thousands of photos of birds. One of my favorites is the California scrub-jay, which often comes to visit my birdfeeder at my apartment.

a blue bird with a white chest, roughly the shape of a crow but smaller, partially hides behind green leaves in a tree — a California scrub-jay *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

The prelude to this decision was developing a birding obsession. During a reunion with my dad’s side of the family, we played a lot of Wingspan, which is a game about collecting birds.

five guys sit around a board game with birds, eggs, cards, a tiny birdhouse, and other bird-themed game pieces — my family and I playing Wingspan during the summer of 2023 *image by Eric Pape, all rights reserved*

After that vacation, I started playing the mobile version of the game on my phone.

In the mobile version, the app will play the calls of the birds you have on your board, and one day, I heard an extremely familiar bird call.

It turned out to be a call I heard constantly for 22 years of my life while living in North Carolina. It wasn’t until this year, after never really listening closely to it, that I recognized it as a sound of home.

That moment made me realize that birds really interested me, and as I expressed this to Laura, she suggested that we go birding sometime. So, we did.

a diptych. on the left, Carter sits at a bench with his phone out and a goofy smile. on the right, Laura poses in front of a turkey standing on top of an electrical utility box — Laura and I out birding in Davis (turkey for scale) *image by Carter Pape, all rights reserved*

completely submerging its head and half its torso to retreive food underwater, a male mallard with a mainly white body, green rump, some brown wing feathers, and bright orange legs — a mallard looking for food *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

For the next several weeks, I would go to various locations around Davis to see whatever birds I could find and add them to my life list — the list of bird species I have seen in my life.

I have been tracking my bird spottings through eBird, a project of Cornell University Lab of Ornithology that allows the public to document their bird sightings, both descriptively and with media (images, videos, and audio).

The project is a really powerful birding tool that allows you to see the areas where particular species tend to be observed, the areas that tend to have the greatest diversity of birds, photos of the birds that you are trying to identify, and a whole bunch of other resources.

One of the tools that has come out of this project is Merlin, a birding app that allows you to identify the birds you see or hear. I used the app heavily to identify nearly every bird I spotted for the first few weeks, and I still use it to identify birds I don’t recognize.

One of the problems with using the app for birding is that it limits the distance from which you can identify a bird. Namely, if you can’t get a good photo of the bird with your phone, the app will have a hard time identifying the bird for you.

Fortunately, iPhones have really good cameras, including 3x and 5x telephoto lenses. Even when I spotted a small bird relatively far away, I could get a good enough photo to identify the subject later.

cross an asphalt pathway, a male and female quail each with a short beak and a feather on top of the head that hangs down in front of the face. The male has a black head with white stripes resembling a headband and chinstrap. The female walking in rear is buffy brown overall — a male and female California quail *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

peeping out from a mud nest hanging underneath a wooden awning, a bird's head with a brown neck fading into a white body. The swallow has a small beak and a white patch between its dark eyes, which are nearly impossible to see against its deep blue head. — a cliff swallow in a mud nest underneath a cliff, which is actually a building *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

a hummingbird with a purplish throat, greenish back, and white body is partially obstructed by leaves in a lemon tree — a hummingbird — probably an Anna’s hummingbird, possibly a Costa’s hummingbird — in a lemon tree *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

Although the iPhone camera is powerful, there are more powerful tools out there for photographing birds. Not only do these tools allow you to photograph birds that are smaller and further away, the quality of the photos these tools produce is such that even a poor shot of a distant bird is usable for identification.

This is not to say that the iPhone can’t take good bird photos. It can, but only of large birds that are close to the camera.

crossing a cement pathway, two turkeys with bald, red heads and gobblers and surprisingly opalescent body feathers reflecting the direct sunlight — two wild turkeys, unbothered by my presence *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

fishing in a grassy marsh area, a heron with a long, straightened neck, yellowish orange beak, black headband above its yellow eye, and gray (but subtly bluish) body feathers — a great blue heron, wary of my presence, but too large to not be seen and photographed *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

I tried buying a spotting scope that came with an attachment that affixed my iPhone to the eyepiece, and while I was able to get some shots with reasonable quality, the contraption was very finnicky. Here’s the best I could do with it:

buffy gray shorebirds stand on a muddy area between the brown water and green grass, most with their beaks tucked into their bodies to rest — a flock of willets, as seen by a phone camera through a spotting scope *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

After deciding I didn’t like digiscoping, I settled on buying a camera. That was its own long process.

I thought at first that I wanted a full-frame Sony camera with the 200-600 mm lens. Full-frame cameras have larger image sensors than cameras with Advanced Photo System type-C (APS-C) image sensors, and I figured if I was already bound to invest thousands of dollars in a camera and lens (which I figured based on the typical cost of telephoto lenses), I might as well buy something I would use for a long time.

Laura and my family talked me down. I decided instead to trawl Craigslist in San Francisco and San Jose for a lens rather than buying new. I also looked for the camera body on which I settled: the Sony A6700. I got a hit on the lens, but not the body.

The lens is the more expensive part anyway, so I felt fine buying the body new. The A6700 was a relatively new model, meaning few people were selling theirs, let alone at a discount from the manufacturer’s price.

I decided against buying a used version of the previous model (the A6600) mainly because I would have had to sacrifice improved auto-focus capabilities that could be specifically tuned for birds. The A6700 also has improved video recording capabilities compared to the A6600.

The same day I got the lens, I took some of the best photos I have taken with it to date.

standing on sticks and mulch, a shorebird with a short beak, buffy brown back, white chest, a black ring around its neck, and red around its eye — a killdeer *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

wading in greenish blue water, a waterfowl with a white beak with a black stripe, gray-to-white body with visibly wet feathers and a leg visible under the water — a pied-billed grebe *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

in front of a partly cloudy blue sky, a soaring raptor with an enormous wingspan compared to its red head and yellow beak. Its black leading feathers and shadowy white tailing feathers stretch to long, finger-looking wingtips — a turkey vulture *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

In a small puddle among short, leafy weeds, a baby goose covered in bright yellow-to-brown feathers, with a short black beak, drips a circular droplet of water as it drinks. — a juvenile Canada goose *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

I believe I was shooting on automatic that day, since it was my first day with the camera. I’ve tried my hand with various modes since then, though never full manual. I kind of suspect that I will never want to or like shooting in full manual. But, I haven’t learned to or tried, so maybe that will change.

What I do know is that I like not having to think too hard about the settings. To the extent possible, I want to point and shoot.

I prefer to let the camera determine the right ISO setting, and I set the shutter speed depending on how much light there is and whether I’m trying to shoot the subject in flight. Many of my early shots had a shutter speed as fast as I could manage, but I’ve recently had success shooting around 1/500th.

The aperture always goes as large as possible (f/6.3) automatically, though I kind of want to limit it to one or a half-stop smaller than maximum since I hear that’s the optimal size.

in front of a totally neutral gray background, standing atop a vertical twig, an olive green hummingbird with an iridescent magenta head. The head feathers fade to a brownish black where they do not directly face the camera. — a male Anna’s hummingbird *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

As of writing, I have observed 133 species of bird, including 78 that I have photographed. Virtually all of the bird photos I have taken are available on eBird.

A few weeks into owning the lens, I realized there was some play in the front part that secures the lens hood to the body. Or, rather, I realized that this play was probably a sign of damage; I’m pretty sure this problem existed when I bought the lens.

I feared for a few days that I would end up needing to ship my lens out to a camera repair shop, which would probably cost hundreds of dollars given that I bought the lens used and probably didn’t qualify to have it covered under warranty.

Fortunately, it turned out this was a problem I could fix myself, according to fpl1966 on fredmiranda.com.

Remove the front rubber gasket.

With a small screwdriver, loosen the four tiny screws securing the silver, metal ring.

You will now have access to the screws that can secure the loose part of the filter thread and lens hood attachment. Tighten them.

Mount everything back together.

— fpl1966 on fredmiranda.com (edited for clarity)

My eternal thanks to fpl1966 for helping me fix my lens. The lens hood is perfectly secure now, and should it ever get loose in the future, I know exactly what it will take to fix it.

a grayish brown bird with a modest beak and yellow eye stands atop a group of sticks in an awkward stance — a wrentit *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

a grayish black bird with an s-shaped, grayish white throat, black webbed feet, a dark teal eye, and a bright yellowish orange beak — a double-crested cormorant *image by Carter Pape, licensed CC BY-SA 4.0*

All the photographs I have taken with my new camera have come exclusively from the central valley and bay area, so I am excited to bring the camera out to North Carolina and photograph some birds there — hopefully including a Carolina wren.