Male Cowbird display for his Lady

[rtbaum]

[IzzieK]

I couldn't have done any better if I tried. I guess the male one is the one on the right? Did you shoot these birds where the turtles were too? What place is this? Are you at a zoo? Why no write up?

[Dave Humphries]

Good behavioral shot Randy,

From this I have learned from this that the Nikon 300mm, f/4 lens (possibly with 1.4x TC?) has no better Bokeh than my Nikon 70-300mm at a similar aperture (f/5.6).

With my lens (and no TC) I shoot at f/8 or f/11 if possible, to improve the Bokeh, by that I mean the double edge effect visible in the out of focus grasses.

However, sometimes you just have to shoot wide to keep shutter speed up and/or noise down in the available light and that's when global sharpening can really bite you, as I believe it has here.

You obviously needed to be fairly aggressive with the sharpening, but this has significantly harmed the foreground and background areas containing brightly lit blades of grass.

You need to sharpen just the main subjects in situations like this to get the best result, there are many ways to achieve that in PS CC. The better ways involve the use of layer masks, but a really simple way (crude but effective), is just to duplicate the layer, hide top layer, switch control to the underneath layer, sharpen it (globally) for best subject result, then turn on the top layer, turn off the underneath layer, switch control to the top layer, zoom in to 100%, erase the birds (revealing 'nothing' underneath), then turn on the lower layer again and the sharpened birds become visible. You can then optionally Flatten layers to save just the combined result.

I should probably be drummed out of CiC for suggesting such bad workflow practices when better ones exist, but this is easy to understand and works for me (until I decide to learn to do things like this properly).

HTH, Dave

[rtbaum]

I couldn't have done any better if I tried. I guess the male one is the one on the right? Did you shoot these birds where the turtles were too? What place is this? Are you at a zoo? Why no write up?

You are correct, the male is on the right. These are in fact just up the road from the turtles at Sherburne National Wildlife Refuge on the 7-mile wildlife drive. I'm fortunate to live about 30 miles from this refuge and visit on a fairly regular basis. If you look closely, you will note blackened stubble. This section underwent a controlled burn early in April to improve the prairie.

In regards to the Cowbirds, I found the behavior interesting. I should be honest and say that I find cowbirds to be avian vermin. I grew up in Michigan where we have a cabin in the Jack Pine barrens, near...and likely within... the very small breeding area of the Kirtland's Warbler. Cowbird is a parasitic bird that replaces other birds eggs with its own. In the case of a bird that nested at the time within a 50 square mile area, it literally threatened the very survival of the species.

[Wavelength]

Beautiful