Ciblek Mania

Every so often, when taking photographs, you get a head-on shot of a bird. Most of these images are fairly weird-looking, and often, they are unusable for publishing because they do not show the key field marks necessary for visual recognition.

Some of them are usable, however. I use this one (of a Carib grackle from Trinidad) to intimidate my kids into cleaning their rooms. I know, brilliant, right?

Here's how: Simply hang a poster-sized version of this image (shown below) on the wall, and pipe in the audio track from "The Birds."

Like Billy Dee Williams used to say about Colt 45 Malt Liquor: "Works every time!"

Last July I was on a digiscoping trip to Trinidad & Tobago sponsored by Leica Sport Optics. On the second day of the trip, we left the friendly confines of Asa Wright Nature Centre for a bit of birding afield. We drove down out of the mountains to the Aripo Agricultural Research Station, where, after turning off the highway into the station's entrance, we encountered our first interesting birds.

A pair of tiny green-rumped parrotlets was exploring a natural cavity in a tree by the roadside and we stopped our vans to try to get photographs of them. We snapped a few shots, but needed to disembark from the van to let everyone see the birds. As happens so often, our stopping and unloading spooked the birds into flight. Even though hundreds of cars and trucks pass right by this tree each day, few of them probably stop by this tree. And our stopping was enough to encourage the birds to flee. We thought they might be nesting in the cavity, so we removed ourselves a bit and waited, hoping they would return.

About this time a crew of workers down the road 40 yards started up their weed-whackers. The noise immediately over-rode all other sounds around us and the tall grass which they were cutting down began to fly, in pieces, in all directions. Along a fence line behind the workers a flock of smooth-billed anis began dropping down onto the ground and flutter-walking over toward the weed whacking action. I did a double-take. Conventional wisdom would have had the birds fleeing at the start of the noisy, smoky, grass-destroying trimmers. But these birds were attracted to the noise and activity.


And then it dawned on me. The anis were after an easy meal. Just like bald eagles waiting below a dam spillway in winter, grizzly bears gorging on post-spawn salmon, or the barn swallows that follow my tractor when I mow, these anis had made the connection between weed whacking and easy-to-catch insect prey. The string trimmers (called, I once was told, "strimmers" in the United Kingdom!) cutting down the grass were disturbing and maiming lots of grasshoppers and beetles and other yummy bugs. Smart birds.]

Here's a short video of the opportunistic smooth-billed anis:



Judging from the height of the grass, the trimming had not been done here for a long time—maybe a few months. Yet the anis knew to associate the sounds and activity with an easy meal. Isn't that interesting?

Smooth-billed anis are reasonably common birds in the central part of their range: from the islands of the Caribbean, south throughout South America. But they reach the united States only in central and southern Florida, where the species seems to be declining rapidly. Where you find one smooth-billed ani, you are likely to find others since they spend their lives as a part of a noisy flock of a dozen or more birds.

Speaking of a flock of anis. I wonder what the term of venery for a flock of anis is? A showtune of anis? A yawn of anis? A Yanni of anis (for the horrible noise they make)? Your suggestions are welcome here.

Let's look more closely... It's a bird—a common potoo, to be specific. Potoos are similar to our North American nightjars—the whip-poor-wills and relatives—in that they are large-mouthed, nocturnal birds that fly around catching and eating large flying moths and other insects.

Part of the common potoo's survival strategy during the day, when it's resting, is to use its cryptic plumage to blend in. It perches on top of a broken tree stub or branch, and points its bill and head upward, looking for all the world like a part of the tree. Look how well this bird blends in!

We were taken to a roosting common potoo by our guide at Asa Wright Nature Centre. The bird was perched on a distant snag, inside the canopy, but we were able to digiscope it. While taking photographs and a bit of video, we saw something remarkable happen.

Here's the video I took, combined with a clip I shot a few days later. I hope you enjoy it.

It's really hard to leave the incredible setting of the Asa Wright Nature Centre verandah, but if you want to see certain species of the centre's wonderful forest birds, you've got to hit the forest trails. Our first morning, after breakfast, we met our guide Roodal Ramlal at the foot of the verandah stairs. He took us down the main trail and into the forest. All around us we heard insects droning and birds calling and singing. Lizards scooted across the path. We kept our eyes peeled for snakes, but, sadly, saw none.


From the dappled sunlight along the upper path, we entered the forest proper, stopping only to identify birds: a golden-olive woodpecker, a cocoa woodcreeper and a cocoa thrush—birds which prompted smart-aleck comments from nearly everyone ("I'm cuckoo for cocoa thrush!")


Jeff Bouton, who works for our trip's sponsor, Leica Sport Optics, contorted his body into all sorts of shapes to get that perfect digiscoped image. This was Jeff's second trip to Asa Wright, so he knew (but only hinted at) what we were about to experience.


Before long we were at one of the spots where manakins could be found. How did we know this? Well, there was a sign...


Actually, there were two signs. One pointing us to the correct spot, the other telling us more about the manakin species we were seeing and hearing: the white-bearded manakin.


A small group of about a dozen male white-bearded manakins was making noise and flitting about a few feet off the ground on the right side of the trail. We stopped and spread out to try to catch some of the action with out eyes, binoculars, spotting scopes, and cameras.



Soon one male stopped close by.And he showed us why the species is known as white-bearded manakin, by puffing out his throat feathers in a partial display to a nearby female whom we never saw.


Soon the forest underbrush was alive with male manakins, flashing about in streaks of black and white. Stopping long enough to strike funny poses, puff out their bearded throats, and do a little dance.


And then the birds came even closer. They seemed to be completely oblivious to our gasped exclamations and beeping, whirring cameras.

Then again, we were nowhere near the top of their must-impress list. That skulking female manakin was the object of their attention. And I have to say, even I was impressed with the energy and singing and dancing prowess that was on display that morning.

But this was just one of four separate, mind-blowing birds we would see on this day, on this trail, in this fabulous place. One of them, I've already shared with you prior to today's post. It was the bearded bellbird.

Tomorrow I'm going to throw down a bit of white-bearded manakin video.

I've heard several well-traveled friends say that Asa Wright Nature Centre in Trinidad is an excellent destination for a bird watcher's first tropical birding experience. All of the characteristics of a tropical birding experience are present at Asa Wright: jungle/rainforest, amazing plant and animal life, heat and humidity. But the diversity of bird species present is not overwhelming.

Whereas a first trip to Brazil might place you in a spot with 25 to 30 tanager species and close relatives, (Costa Rica has 45 tanagers, Panama 42) Trinidad has about 15 tanagers and relatives. And this holds true across many of the tropical bird families. So it makes for a less confusing introduction to tropical bird watching.

But I believe that Asa Wright is also ideally set up for digiscoping tropical birds. The feeders at Asa are teeming with visitors. The elevated verandah is surrounded by trees and perches used by the birds coming and going to the feeders. Farther out but in plain view are more distant trees used by toucans, tityras, tanagers, and raptors that don't visit the feeders. And the trails! The local nature trails have lekking manakins and singing bellbirds that are regular as clockwork. More on that tomorrow.

All of the images in this post were digiscoped from the verandah (that's how the locals spell it) at the Asa Wright Nature Centre in Trinidad. These are just my "keepers."

One of the casualties of the recent trip to Trinidad and Tobago was my travel guitar. The headstock cracked off my Martin Backpacker guitar (again). About five years ago I slammed it in a van door, snapping off this rather important part, rendering it unplayable. A local luthier glued it back together and it played as good as new. That is, until I got the bright idea to take it along to the tropics on a trip where there would be some musically oriented fellow travelers. This could have been an installment of that Saturday Night Live skit for "Bad Idea Jeans."

This guitar, the Martin Backpacker, was made to travel. Before it lost its head, this guitar looked a bit like a kayak paddle and sounded only a little better. Unless I could plug it into and amp and use some effects to juice up its sound, the Backpacker was mostly just good enough for some casual, quiet picking and playing. Its sound was thin and tinny. But when there was no other guitar available, I was certainly glad to have this one along. I'd played her outside, inside, and in at least eight different U.S. states, plus one foreign country.

And speaking of that foreign country...

The glue in the guitar's head mend hated the hot, hot heat and the heavy humidity of Trinidad and Tobago. Somewhere between Port of Spain, Trinidad, and Speyside, Tobago, she gave up the ghost. I was sad but accepting. She'd been under such strain lately, what with the medium strings I'd put on her, and the sing-along pop songs we'd played in the van on the road from Matura Beach. Ah, she'd lived a good life, but that life was, sadly, now over.

The thought flitted across my mind like a tortoise-shell pick across a newly tuned high E: maybe I should leave her where she died.

No.

She was American-made and her remaining pieces should, by all rights, be returned to her place of birth. So I carted her lifeless, headless, tuneless body back home on a series of jets, her head still attached to her body by the now-silent and flopping A, D, G, and B strings.


Someday I may strip off her useful parts: thinline pick-up, tuners, strap knobs, and commit her body to the flames. But for now, she's resting in a corner of the basement. She shares that cool, dark space with all of her friends—my numerous other guitars. Now that she's gone, I'm sure they'll miss her, too.

The last song I played on my little Backpacker was "Goodnight Irene." So I guess that was her actual name: Irene. Goodnight, old gal. I'll see you in my dreams...

Not very far down the jungle trail from the main building of the Asa Wright Nature Centre, there's a sign that says Bearded Bellbird. When I first saw this, I thought "Right, like the birds always hang around right by the sign! How conVEEENient!"

Just then, the loud, ringing call note for which these birds are named clanged down from the forest canopy. There WAS a bearded bellbird and it was up there somewhere, calling repeatedly.

Moments later, Julie shouted "I've got the bellbird!" And she did. We scrambled into position to find the bird for binocular looks. Then we trained our spotting scopes on it. The bird was fairly close, reasonably well-lit, and every time it gave a note, its rastalike black wattles (or "beard") shook like wet spaghetti.

How sweet this was—my first decent look at a bellbird, one of those tropical species that jumps out at you from the field guide pages when you're dreaming of life birds. I'd heard bellbirds before. But seeing is bell-lieving.

I took a few still photos with my Leica digiscoping rig, then decided to shoot a short digital video. Here's what the bearded bellbird looked and sounded like at Asa Wright Nature Centre in Trinidad on Monday, July 20, 2009.

Taking pictures in the rainforest—any rainforest or jungle or woods—is a challenge particularly due to the lack of light. On the recent digiscoping trip we took to Trinidad and Tobago, sponsored by Leica Sport Optics, I got to compare the relative difficulty and success/failure rate of taking photographs with a digiscoping set-up versus taking photographs with a professional-grade digital SLR camera.

My loaner digiscoping rig consisted of a Leica APO-Televid HD-65mm spotting scope, a Leica D-Lux 4 digital camera, and a bayonet-mount digiscoping adaptor.

My big-rig digital SLR camera is a Canon 30D with a 300mm fixed, image-stabilized, lens.

One of the images above (a female rufous-tailed jacamar) was taken with each set-up. I took these shots moments apart from one another on a trail in Gilpin Trace rainforest on Tobago.

Both images are just as they were taken, no adjustments to color, sharpness, or cropping. Both were exported as jpegs for use in Blogspot.

Can you guess which one was taken with which rig?




I know from other attempts at digital SLR photography in the deep, dark jungle, that it can be really hard to get good "keeper" photos, especially without the use of a tripod and a bracket-mounted flash unit. When I returned from the Philippines last spring, I was crushed to see how few of my D-SLR images were good enough to keep. Some of this was the result of low-light conditions, some of it was due to "operator error" and some of it was just plain old bad luck.

This is where digiscoping can really pay big dividends for the bird watcher who also likes to snap a few images of birds that happen to cooperate. If a bird sits still for more than a few seconds, it's a candidate for digiscoping. The only downside is that you do need to haul a spotting scope with you in order to digiscope most effectively.

The Leica scopes we were using are the new, top-of-the-line models. Mine was the APO-Televid 65. The coatings and lenses on these scopes gather an incredible amount of light. The focus on them is super-fine. Combining this with the high-end compact Leica cameras we were using, and we had a nearly perfect set-up for digiscoping.

And the images? Well, I can't resist showing off one more digiscoped image from that same day.

This series of images of a great kiskadee (coughing up a ball of what I assume are insect exoskeleton bits), was taken from the verandah of Asa Wright Nature Centre in Trinidad. In the last image, the bird looks almost relieved, and perhaps a bit embarrassed that the whole episode was captured on camera.

There are days (like today) when I'd like to be able to cough up a huge ball of stuff, if it would make everything better. On second thought, maybe there are better ways to make oneself feel better. Like playing a softball double-header. Think I'll try that instead...