’Twas the Week Before Christmas...

“Five mer-gan-sers,

One king-fish-er,

And a mer-lin in a tall tree!”

Raleigh/Durham, NC
December 19-20, 2009

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This weekend I finally got around to tracking down the merlin (reported on CAROLINABIRDS by Dan K.) which has been frequenting the Hillandale golf course in Durham for the past several winters. The bird was right where Dan said it would be. The bird was perched atop a very tall sweetgum tree, and the lighting was terrible. I used a 600mm f/4 lens + 2x TC (effective: 1200mm) and then spent some time tweaking the images in Photoshop to bring out more details of the bird’s plumage. The hooded mergansers (at least three males and two females) have now returned to Duke Gardens; though the autumn colors are mostly gone, I was still able to get some images with relatively colorful backgrounds reflecting in the water. I also finally tracked down the lead on the male belted kingfisher which was relayed to me by a photographer I met several months ago. The bird hunts along the northern edge of Lake Lynn in Raleigh; I spent several hours in the late afternoon tracking the bird, and eventually it came to a perch close to the boardwalk where I could photograph it. I know of several other areas frequented by kingfishers, but the birds never let me get close, unlike this particular individual. The mergansers and kingfisher were photographed at 840mm (600mm+1.4x TC), though a 400mm lens would probably be good enough to at least get some wide shots of these birds, and I’ve gotten photos of the mergansers at point-blank range with a tiny 100-300mm zoom lens in the past.

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