Difficult Birds!

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Success with photographing birds usually depends on observing two main rules - getting out often enough to where the target species hang out and being patient until they approach near enough to where you are. I've been observing these rules lately and they've worked reasonably well for most birds that I've wanted to photograph but there are two species that I've had a lot of problems with.

The first difficult species has been the Northern Harrier. I see several Harriers every time I go out to the Katy Prairie and I've been seeing one fairly often on the CyFair campus. However, even though I've been very patient, all the Harriers that I've spotted have stayed well away from me. As a result, the photos I've gotten till now have been poor shots of distant birds, like the ones below. So I guess I'll just have to keep on being patient until a Harrier eventually comes close enough for me to get decent pictures!

The other difficult species has been the House Wren. Now I wouldn't mind if the problem was that there haven't been many of these Wrens around, but that certainly isn't the case. Every time I walk around the CyFair campus nature trail I hear at least one House Wren and frequently two or three. However, getting to see them and getting photos has been incredibly difficult. Sometimes the light has been too bad. Sometimes a bird has appeared and then disappeared before I could raise my camera. Sometimes I've only been able to see parts of a bird.

Last week I finally got lucky and managed to grab a couple of photos. They aren't great shots by any means but at least the images are recognizable.

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