Got any bird pics?

Challenging to shoot owl photos when it is dark out. There was a moon but this was looking east and was not even sure where the owls were until I took a test shot. My camera has a neat feature that has live exposure mode where you hit the button once and the finder shows you how the exposure develops in realtime as it goes longer. You hit the shutter button again when you see the lightness you liked via finder. One of these is well over 20 secs long so the star trails started to develop. When the owls hoot they blur things up as well.

These new cameras are crazy in their endless abilities.

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Last one below is what happens if an owl leaves during the exposure. With his weight off the branch, it burned a different angle to the image. His mate stayed still enough to get more beamed in (well...sort of a Star Trek transporter sequence I suppose).

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grabbed this off the net-same concept
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Those are really good for night shots! (Anytime i try night shots I am not smart enough to know how to tweak my settings and the sensor is not good enough to figure it out for me, plus, tremor is not kind to long exposures. The iphone does a way better job at it than me or my fancy camera....)
 
The "ghost" owl is my favorite shot, John!
 
I have a duck nesting in my yard. One by one, its eggs are being picked off by the local crow patrol. The duck flies off to the lake to get a drink or something, the crows come right in and steal an egg from the nest. The duck flies back and roosts on perch with the shattered egg a few feet away. It's pretty brutal, the duck seems a little oblivious...

I've noted of my 4 nesting boxes this year, so far they are all- perhaps excepting one- empty. The crows have a martial law thing going on.
The only positive nesting sign is our straw doormat is old and falling apart and birds are picking off a ton of nesting material from it so maybe the boxes are being filled and I've just missed it.
 
Crows are extremely intelligent, but they are brutal feathered demons. Starlings are just a miniature version of flying vermin.
 
SpeyrodGB said:
From a recent visit to eastern MT.
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Boy, the head on that vulture is quite dark. Just looking at the picture, I was thinking black vulture, not turkey vulture, which would have a red head and neck. It could just be a trick of the light. On the one hand, the range of the black vulture is South America, Central America, Mexico, the Gulf States and up the Eastern Seaboard but short of the Great Lakes. But there are some reported sightings of black vultures in Montana on eBird. Do you have any other pictures?
Steve
 
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Cabezon said:
Boy, the head on that vulture is quite dark. Just looking at the picture, I was thinking black vulture, not turkey vulture, which would have a red head and neck. It could just be a trick of the light. On the one hand, the range of the black vulture is South America, Central America, Mexico, the Gulf States and up the Eastern Seaboard but short of the Great Lakes. But there are some reported sightings of black vultures in Montana on eBird. Do you have any other pictures?
Steve
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This one isn't really any better. There was some red on the head, however an iPhone through a windshield is not the best for wildlife photography. There was a raptor that left before the vulture moved tot he shoulder of the road. After the vulture flew off, I saw a dead snake along the shoulder. Most of the snake had already been eaten.
 

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