While photographing feeder birds at a cabin in northern Minnesota this winter, I noticed something about Pileated Woodpeckers that I had not noticed in other birds. When I photograph birds, I know that I can move when they are not looking at me. So when they turn their heads or I can hide behind something to get a better position for a pic, the birds don't notice that something is happening because they do not see any motion. Often I can do the same thing if I just walk very slowly towards them and with as little side or up and down motion, I can get much closer to get better pics.
I tried to do the same thing with each of a pair of Pileated Woodpeckers at this feeder at a cabin in the snow. I was in the cabin and had mastered my technique of getting to the best screenless window for pics along various sides of the large bin feeder. Suet cakes hung on one side. I continued to fail to be able to get good pics of the pileateds. They kept flying away at the least motion, I thought. So I began testing to see if they fled due to a certain type of motion or just a difference in the view the birds came back to when they turned their heads back towards me. After six frustrating days of blurry and strained pics of the frequent visiting pileateds, I concluded that unlike the finches, jays, nuthatches, hawks, and all the other birds present, the pileateds seemed unique in their ability to be able to detect even a minuscule change in the picture they saw in when they return their gaze to the cabin. They looked away and from inside the 3 season porch, with me standing hidden behind the wall between the large windows, I would simply hold my hand up when they looked away. They didn't fly as I raised my hand. They took off in a blink when they looked back and noticed something had changed. I test several variations and they only thing they didn't fly away from was a wire flyswatter handle that I held in the window. I don't know about you, but I struggle to solve those "what is different in the two pictures" puzzles. And here is a bird whose survival strategy includes noticing minute changes in a microsecond of looking back at an image they had seen once. Amazing! No wonder all my pileated shots are from a distance. Thomas Maiello Angel Environmental Management, Inc. Maple Grove, MN ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
