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Weekend Expedition Plans: A Comox Valley Mystery Tour

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This weekend I have no fixed expedition plans… Tomorrow Catherine and I head out to Comox on Vancouver Island to help her parents move, so it could be that the only photo ops come from the ferry ride. That being said, last time I was at the old homestead, there were two wet eagles perched about 20 feet off the balcony, so that was something!

So the details of the expedition are sketchy and mysterious as of now, but sometimes these turn out the best…Stay tuned for the results!

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Wet Eagle 2

Trumpeter Swans are another Comox Valley wintertime treat.

High speed Fly Takeoff

We had a representative of High Speed imaging Inc. in the lab today to demonstrate some high speed cameras…So what did we record? Some blowflies of course!

Check out how these awesome flies take off:

We have used high speed cameras before, but this one was pretty impressive. This video was recorded at 4000 frames per second, and is slowed down to 30, so it is about 133 times slower than real life. No wonder they are so hard to catch!

Cheapskate Tuesday 5: Extension Tubes

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One of the cheapest and highest-quality ways of getting into closeup and macro photography with a DSLR is to use your nifty fifty on extension tubes. Extension tubes are a time-honoured way of decreasing the minimum focusing distance of any lens by moving it further from the image plane. The magnification you can achieve depends on the focal length of the lens and the amount of extension.

Perhaps the best illustration is to show a familiar object at three different focal distances with different combinations of tubes.

Here is what the 50 mm can do at its closest focusing distance on a cropped-frame camera:

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with just 12 mm of extension, here is the same subject:

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And with all 65 mm of extension tubes added, we can get really close:

50 mm with 65 mm extension tubes

Clearly, there is a great difference in close focusing ability with the tubes mounted. Also, I used an American penny as we just got rid of ours.

When you buy extension tubes, they often come in a set of three. mine had 13, 21, and 31 mm tubes, for a combined total of 65 mm.

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As you can see in the photo above, the tubes have contacts to command the lens’ focus and aperture from the camera. While these that I bought some years ago are often the cheapest of the products available (about 50 bucks a set), I recommend buying the more expensive Kenko branded ones (maybe 170 if you shop around?). My old tubes are mostly plastic, and the mount pieces are starting to wear and break. Kenko tubes have metal mounts and thus should last much longer. Sometimes being a cheapskate doesn’t pay off! That being said, if all you will mount will be the 50, the plastic tubes should last a good long time. With heavier lenses, there is bound to be more strain on the mounts.

With 65 mm of extension on a 50 mm lens, we can achieve slightly better than 1:1 magnification. This means that we can fill the frame left to right with a subject measuring 22 mm on a crop frame camera. This is pretty darn good for most insect work.

Where extension tubes get difficult is that to achieve different magnifications, one has to keep swapping them out and re-combining them. While all this fiddling is going on, your subject may be some distance away! Also, while the tubes are mounted, you have only a narrow Goldilocks zone of focus, and you cannot focus to infinity. If you were crouched down shooting a butterfly and Bigfoot walked by, you might miss the shot, while your buddy with the compact camera and the quick-dismounting Raynox DCR 250 would nail it!

Nonetheless, this is a great method for getting into macro and closeup photography.

So what kind of real-world results can be achieved?

This megachilid bee, photographed at Iona Beach, is brought in very close with the 50 mm on 34 mm of extension tubes.

A group of Lucilia sericata and a lone Phormia regina feed on the abdominal cavity of a dead rat. This shot used the 50 mm on just 13 mm of extension.

This detail of an Iris almost makes it appear to be a sea creature…Thanks, extension tubes!

To get this Rhododendron Leafhopper (Graphocephala fennahi)to fill the frame, all 66 mm of tubes were used.

Provided your subject is still, getting in close is not a problem.

The modest 21 mm of extension brought this life and death drama of the crab spider and the Apple Clearwing into focus.

Extension tubes can also be used with shorter lenses, but get much past 35 mm and the working distance is going to be very tight and possibly unworkable. With longer lenses, the magnification gains are more modest, but sometimes the shortened working distance can be useful. I also get nice results with the 300 mm f4 and tubes, but I will wait til spring has sprung and I shoot some more material before I post about that.

Anyway, I hope that I have been a good advocate for the use of tubes and cheap 50s to get in close. If you cannot afford a macro lens, but would like to make some nice closeups, this will get you started and keep you happy for a good long while.

Weekend Expedition 5: Iona Beach with Wild Research

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A beautiful springlike day was a great change from the last Wild Research fieldtrip. Wow. The spiders were crawling, the birds were singing, the frogs were calling and there were warblers and ladybirds, caterpillars and flies.

This bird ID fieldtrip didn’t provide a plethora of species, but it was a very pleasant outing nonetheless. I definitely need to get back for some early insect photos if we get another nice day like that.

Please see below a gallery of images obtained on the weekend expedition to Iona Beach.

Crow Portraits

I think this is my most popular crow picture. I have shot hundreds of others, but this one particular inclination of the head seems to captivate people.

Many photographers struggle to find models, often paying lots of money to professional agencies or resorting to Model Mayhem to recruit on-camera talent. In Vancouver, I have found a huge selection of beautiful models who will work for peanuts. Literally.

One of my favorite activities in bird photography is to assemble a group of hungry crows in order to hone  my camera technique and practice my timing  Crows are photographically challenging due to their dark tones, but repeated efforts will yield nice results. These abundant city crows are used to scavenging human refuse and soliciting handouts, so feeding them does not risk altering their survival skillset.

They will approach closely, so shooting them with a 50 mm lens is definitely doable.

Contrasting the dark detailed plumage with saturated creamy backgrounds makes for a great portrait. Longer focal lengths are usually needed for this.

What I love especially about these birds is their curiosity and mannerisms that call to mind their intelligence.

In the Vancouver area, there is a high abundance of crows, who (when not rearing young) fly into the city at dawn from huge communal roost sites in Burnaby.

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These birds are headed from Coquitlam into Burnaby for the evening . The daily migration gathers birds from all around the area.

Because they are such willing subjects, I can experiment with different lighting styles, even overused hipster clichés.

lens flare and loss of contrast due to light source close to the subject. A no no or an interesting effect?

What I find most intriguing is how individual birds look so different from one another. In this shot, the preening crow looks almost raven-like.

I can show context or isolate. This was shot in Victoria in the spring, with blooming camas in a Garry Oak meadow.

One of the best things about working with an urban social species is that they go about most parts of their lives in front of humans, so they do not alter their behavior because of fear.  So I try to catch natural behavior as well, such as calling, anting, foraging,  playing, and allopreening.

During nesting season, the crows get a bit more reluctant to share their space with us.

Anting looks so satisfying! (it is likely to repel or kill ectoparasites)

Get your fresh water where you can.

Crow love. Allopreening (mutual grooming) is common in pair bonding birds. It probably arises in other situations also.

The red gape of this begging juvenile will disappear and become black like an adult. Also note the brownish tone of the juvenal countour feathers.

Another juvenile crow, this one learning how to forage on shellfish.

This was an attempt to shoot a “Meet Your Neighbours” style shot

Many many interesting moments can be had in rapid succession with a group of crows in attendance.

All in all, I think the crow makes a worthy model for future photographic study. I keep returning to them for inspiration and practice. There are so many more behaviors, looks and moods I would like to document. When nothing else is going well, a photo session with crows can always boost my morale and stir my imagination.
What kind of familiar subjects do you return to?

Go out and try some crow photography, or shoot whatever is your local equivalent. You may find that you return again and again for inspiration.

Red-throated Caracara research: natural history and classification from 1765 to 1838

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This is the illustration of the Petit Aigle d’Amerique from “Planches enluminées d’histoire naturelle” 1765

I mentioned last week in my introduction to the Red-throated Caracara  that there is very little known about the species. While details of the life history of these birds are still hazy, the existence of the bird has in fact been known to scientists for quite a long time. To know a species, we must first be able to recognize it as distinct and to give it a name. There is a formal protocol for this, that has been developed and refined through time, and it so happens that the Red-throated Caracara has a long history in zoological classification.  I normally find the  subject of early nomenclature work to be a bit dry, but I am pleased to report that work with the Red-throated Caracara has been a surprisingly pleasing visual endeavour from the outset.

The first published description that I can find on these caracaras belongs to Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon to be exact, one of the pioneering Enlightenment era naturalists. Buffon’s 1765 description consisted of an engraving and a name, “Aigle d’Amerique” in the “Planches enluminées d’histoire naturelle“, a 24 volume set of coloured engravings done mainly by F.N. Martinet, a talented engraver. This work was commissioned by Buffon and supervised by Daubenton, so authorship is a bit muddled, but on the whole,  the work is mainly attributed to Buffon. He recognized this species as an eagle, rather than a falcon, as he considered the shape of the bill, down turned at the end, to be more eagle-like.

Drawing inspiration directly from Buffon/Martinet/Daubenton’s work, the first written description seems to be that of an Englishman, one John Latham, who described the bird quite well and called it “the Red-throated Falcon” on page 97 of his 1781 book “A general synopsis of birds“. It is unclear why Latham placed this species with the falcons, although he was quite correct to do so.

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Here is Latham’s original description, which gives the name Red-Throated Falcon, and notes the occurrence of the species in Cayenne and other parts of South America

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I think it is a moft beautiful fpecies too!

While this is a step along the path, it was not yet the official scientific name of the Red-throated Caracara…Latham’s description may have been useful, but it is not considered the first official species description. That honour goes to Pieter Boddaert, who, in 1783 gave this species its first Latin binomial: Falco americanus in “Table des planches enluminéez d’histoire naturelle de M. D’Aubenton: avec les denominations de M.M. de Buffon, Brisson, Edwards, Linnaeus et Latham, precedé d’une notice des principaux ouvrages zoologiques enluminés“. As the species name “americanus” now has precedence, it has remained attached to the Red-throated Caracara to this day.

In 1786 Gmelin (who was an associate of Carolus Linnaeus) named it Falco aquilinus, but this is considered a junior synonym, as it was published after Boddaert’s F. americanus.

In 1816 L.P. Vieillot moved this species to “Ibycter” in “Analyse d’une nouvelle ornithologie élémentaire“. This was the first written communication that applied the genus name “Ibycter” to the Red-throated Caracara, which has more or less stuck, and also a new common name “Rancanca” which has not. I am very intrigued by the origin of the name Ibycter…I have not found what it refers to, whether to mythology or if it is just an obscure word…Anyone out there have some insight?

The first real natural history information on the Red-throated Caracara comes from 1834, with the publication of “La Galerie des Oiseaux“, also by L.P. Vieillot. Delightfully, “La Galerie” also includes an image of the species!

Lithograph from Galerie des Oiseaux featuring the Red-throated Caracara. This is presumably attributable to Godefroy Engelmann, a lithographer based in Paris.

 In addition to the new name, Ibycter Leucogaster, Vieillot contributed some real natural history to the scientific record, noting their loud calls and group living habits. In addition, having read Vieillot for the first time last week, I was shocked to read his statement that these caracaras are “ordinarily accompanied by toucans”. This habit, which apparently earned them the local name “Capitaines des gros-becs (Toucan Captains!), is not just some 19th century BS either, it was also made by Thiollay in his 1991 paper.

Thiollay noted several species that could be described as toucans accompanying the caracaras: The Guiana Toucanet Selenidera culik, Black-necked Araçari Pteroglossus aracari, Green Araçari Pteroglossus viridis, Channel-billed Toucan Ramphastos vitellinus and the Red-billed Toucan. The latter species was the one most commonly found accompanying the Red-throated Caracaras.  But we get ahead of ourselves. Let us stay in the first half of the 19th century, shall we?

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Red-billed Toucans often do follow Red-throated Caracaras. They also sound like a small dog barking.

In 1838, the first popular work to mention this species was published. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge published their Penny Cyclopaedia with the express (and proto-socialist) idea to bring scientific knowledge to the working classes. This was kind of like the Wikipedia of 19th Century Britain. Here is their entry (with an illustration!) for the Red-throated Caracara (on the bottom right). This is part of a much larger section of falcons in general, and is quite commendable for its completeness.

The penny cyclopædia [ed. by G. Long].

This brings us to the middle of the 19th Century. Darwin was just about to arrive back from his voyage on the Beagle, Wallace was yet to set sail for Pará (where he would collect a Red-throated Caracara!), and the world of natural history was yet to be turned on its head by the revelations of Natural Selection as formulated by these two.

I am sure there are many taxonomic references I have left out that I could have usefully employed, but my attention must be elsewhere at the moment. I will return to the early world of ornithological literature, specifically the second half of the 19th Century at a later date. If you are eager to see a list of early synonyms and their references, look no further than page 22 of Strickland’s Ornithological Synonyms below.

synonymsThis is the short early history of the scientific description for just a single species of bird. Of course, there are many many others who share a more or less parallel track through the literature. What I find fascinating is that I can do a few short hours of study on the internet and bring to you this history without even visiting a library or a museum.  Thanks go out to the Internet Archive and the Biodiversity Heritage Library websites, who make trawling through and accessing this literature possible.  An thanks to you for reading!

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New post tomorrow!

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Tomorrow I will take you on a fabulous journey from the Enlightenment to the Industrial Age, and the first 85 years of scientific knowledge of the Red-throated Caracara!

Weekend Expedition Plans: Reifel Bird Sanctuary

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I would like to get out to the George C. Reifel Bird Sanctuary on Westham Island, if I can arrange transportation… Folks have been shooting lots of cool stuff out there and I would like to give it a go.  The goal? Get out into new territory and not be such a homebody…If suitable transport cannot be arranged, I will have to wing it with the bus system.

The main work-related goal this weekend is to prepare a 40 minute talk on caracara foraging biology for next Thursday’s Les Ecologistes seminar.