Photographing Birds Close to Home


There are not many places in Canada where you can photograph a dozen species of birds 10 minutes from your home.

Living in Calgary you can accomplish this easily.Yesterday, I went for a short drive to do some bird photography. Spring is always great for birds in Southern Alberta and between mid-April and mid-June, you never know what you will see as was the case yesterday.

The Bow River runs through Calgary and it attracts a lot of birds during the migration. So, in Calgary, it is the best place to wonder around to find birds. Here are some birds I photographed on a single day.

The Osprey had eaten half of the fish, Lesser Yellowlegs were feeding on newly hatched Mayflies, The Common Mergansers weren't aware I was close, There were hundreds of Franklin's gulls feeding in the river, An American Robin pulled a worm out of the ground as a Great Blue Heron flew in and landed, not long after a Cormorant flew up the river, as a Red-winged Blackbird was singing in the Cottontails.

This Orange-crowned Kinglet was in my backyard.

Note: For the photographs above I let the meter do its job and then I adjusted the exposure with the EV button. For example the Osprey I overexposed by four stops. My camera was set to center weighted metering.