Tuesday, June 11, 2024

Overnight

I didn't learn my lesson from scanning through 6,000 potential hummingbird images yesterday. I set the Gardepro out overnight, aimed at the hummingbird feeder again but shooting from a lower angle to get the birds against the sky. This time I had 40,000 images to go through, taken between 8 pm and 9 am. I thought maybe there would be very few images in the dark, but the motion detector kept working through the night and more than 20,000 of the images were lit with the no-glow flash. I was hoping to get flash-lit birds, but there were none. The morning birds were still in shadow, but shooting against the sky gives good profiles.

Later in the day I put out the camera trying to get sunlit birds, and gleaned a few from the 10,000 additional images. At 4:42 when the fifth image shown below was taken, the sun had already moved to the point where the bird was mostly backlit. As I was taking a closer look, I realized it was not a Calliope like all of the other hummingbird images I've gotten since 2021. I'm going to say this is a Ruby-throated as I referenced previously in a 2021 blog post on my site. This reminds me that one of the other names for Trail Cameras is Scout Cameras. Now I know there is more in the area than just Calliopes. This fifth image was shot from only 12 inches away, and still the bird is very tiny.

I'm done for now with flipping through 10,000 images at a time. I will be moving the closeup camera to the small bird bath hoping to get a flicker or something.

Just before sunset yesterday
Just after sunset yesterday
20,000 images like this
After sunrise today
Not a Calliope

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