Last night around 11pm, I decided to point my thermal infrared camera to the sky and see if anything would show up. To my surprise, I was able to observe a fairly steady stream of bird movement, some low and bright, others faint and barely discernible amid the noise from the sensor. It was quite captivating, like looking for meteor showers.
I uploaded four "highlight clips", linked from the page below. I tried uploading to YouTube, but its re-encoding washed out many of the subtler bird. I deliberately oriented the camera (and flipped the image) so that up was north, left was west, etc. Most were flying northward or northerly, but every now and then one would come down the other way. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~suan/infrared/info.html#nightflight For those who feel like doing the math, the 35mm lens I used has a FOV of 10.5 degrees by 7.9 degrees. I didn't do a survey to estimate density, but it sounds like Bill Evans will be trying that this season. Suan PS. From that same page above you can find links to the original mp4s of the best Woodcock videos as well. -- Cayugabirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/CayugabirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/cayugabirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/Cayugabirds 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/CAYU.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
