Now that the pressure of UWOL #3 is over, I can get back to playing around with the blackbirds. The males are now very actively defending territories and the females busy with feeding chicks, or incubating eggs. Here is a short of a beautiful male displaying on a cattail stem.

Rick

Rick,

A beautiful bird and nice shot, how about uploading a HQ version to Internet Birds http://www.hbw.com/ibc/

Bob

Thanks Bob. I had considered contributing to the IBC before, but I wasn't aware it was possible to upload to the site. Thought you had to send it on a DVD or CD. I'll email their contact address and see what they have to say.

Rick

Rick,

Really nice clip. It was good to hear its call also. What mic setup are you using for long distance shots?

Regards,

Hi Rick.
Beautiful clip of your Blackbird there.
I can see it is a bit different than our Blackbird, with the red on it's wings, our is all black.
Here's a photo I took this winter, visiting my birdfeeder.
I've cut the pic, for use on my website.
It is taken with my Canon EOS 350D still camera.

Hi Rick.
Beautiful clip of your Blackbird there.
I can see it is a bit different than our Blackbird, with the red on it's wings, our is all black.
Here's a photo I took this winter, visiting my birdfeeder.
I've cut the pic, for use on my website.
It is taken with my Canon EOS 350D still camera.

Thank you, Geir. Although the name is the same...the two birds are not very closely related, as your blackbird is in the Thrush family (like our American Robin and bluebirds) and the Red-winged Blackbird is in a different family all together. Both are really pretty birds.

Rick

Beautiful clip Rick, thank you; more, more

Rick,

nice footage!! I have yellow headed black birds here, if you like I can try to grab one for you to see.

What compression settings are you using?? 320x240?? etc.


thanks for sharing.

Dale, would love to see a Yellow-headed Blackbird clip. Interesting story about this. A few years ago one showed up in a huge flock of mixed wintering blackbirds not to far away in Greene County, Tennessee. A group of us went over to see the bird (extremely rare in Tennessee). We were looking thru binocs scanning the feeding flocks for the bird. Finally we spotted it. Just seconds after I first saw this lifer the whole flock burst into the sky like a bomb exploding. Put the binocs down just in time to see a Peregrine Falcon stoop into the flock and pull out a red-wing. Never did see the Yellow-headed again.

I cropped out the video a bit to a 16:9 format and then resized and compressed it with Windows Media Encoder 9 using a setting for streaming and a bitrate of around 340 Kbps in 428x240 size.

Rick