Bird Feeders Are For The Birds!

Yesterday we set up our new bird feeders in the back yard.  Our realtor gave us one as a house warming present and we bought a second one for variety.   The squirrels instantly took up living in one – literally I saw the squirrel sprawled over the top just eating all the food he could stuff in his mouth while his compatriot sat on the ground nibbling up anything that happened to fall out.  So much for squirrel proofing devices.  The other feeder has been more successful in actually attracting birds.  Yellow finches to be exact.  I think there were about 8 of them sitting in the tree when I opened the door to check them out.

They are fairly tame – or at least not completely freaked out by the paparazzi taking their pictures.  They even sat relatively still for me to take their picture hand-holding my camera with the 300 mm lens near sunset.

I placed the feeder just below the tree hoping that the birds would hang out in the tree waiting their turn and letting me get a more natural picture of them.  Now I just have to practice hand holding with the 300 to get a sharp picture.  I think there are worse things I could be doing :-).  We have some pretty premium seed so hopefully we will get a variety of birds.  I think I even saw a female cardinal up in the tree but I’m not 100% sure.  I’ll have to get a good picture book (suggestions welcome) of birds and start figuring out who has been tweeting so early in the morning.  I know it wasn’t me!

Photo information:  Canon 5D Mark III with a 70-300mm lens.  I was just playing around so I didn’t keep track of the rest of the information.  I think I had it on automatic everything  for both of these shots because I was just checking how close I could get before they got uncomfortable and flew off.

You can check out my latest additions to my on-line gallery of photos here.