Hermit Thrush - 05 May 2020

This afternoon I spotted a Hairy Woodpecker on the suet feeder. Five years to the day that we closed on Brownton Abbey did we finally get a Hairy Woodpecker in the yard.

I decided to put the flash on the Sony a7RIV and try to photograph birds out back this evening. It was cloudy and warm enough to not need gloves so I went to relocate the Blue-headed Vireo from this morning. I would dip on that bird, but would find a very nice consolation in the form of a most-photogenic Hermit Thrush.

The flash did little to illuminate the bird under my high-speed settings (HSS), so I just shot without it (this would give me 10 fps instead of the 2-3 fps that I felt I was getting with the flash on). Besides, the flash has locked settings and I need to figure out how to access the controls again...

Here is a White-throated Sparrow with and without flash using HSS settings.

with flash

without flash

The Eastern Towhee was nearby. Again, the flash failed to illuminate so I turned it off.

Flash did work on closer subjects, like this dandelion and strawberry.

But, things got weird when I tried it on the Eastern Bluebird in afternoon sunlight; the camera gave me 1/8000 sec. at ISO 32,000! I was able to recover the image fairly well in post-processing.

Brownton Abbey, 26340 Higgins Way, Wayne, Michigan, US
May 5, 2020 4:00 PM - 4:50 PM
Protocol: Traveling
0.5 mile(s)
5 species

Hairy Woodpecker (Dryobates villosus)  1
Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis)  1
Hermit Thrush (Catharus guttatus)  1
White-throated Sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis)  1
Eastern Towhee (Pipilo erythrophthalmus)  1

View this checklist online at https://ebird.org/checklist/S160284334

This report was generated automatically by eBird v3 (https://ebird.org/home)