{"id":28080,"date":"2014-11-24T16:45:14","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T23:45:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=28080"},"modified":"2014-11-25T06:45:04","modified_gmt":"2014-11-25T13:45:04","slug":"kingfisher-casting-a-pellet-canon-7d-vs-7d-mark-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2014\/11\/24\/kingfisher-casting-a-pellet-canon-7d-vs-7d-mark-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Kingfisher Casting A Pellet (Canon 7D vs 7D Mark 2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been watching this female Belted Kingfisher from afar for several weeks now but in typical kingfisher fashion she has been unapproachable.\u00a0 But yesterday morning she partially atoned for her bashful ways and performed some interesting behavior for my camera.<\/p>\n

All six of these photos are large crops (each is exactly 35% of the original image). No noise reduction applied.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"belted<\/p>\n

\u00a01\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark 2, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

As usual she was perched far away, this time on an old nesting platform in the middle of a pond at Farmington Bay WMA.\u00a0 At first she was facing to my left but then she turned around and faced the other way…<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"belted<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark 2, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

and began to retch.\u00a0 Whenever this behavior begins (in a variety of species) it looks at first like yawning but when it continues I’m immediately on the lookout for pellet-casting.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"belted<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark 2, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0It soon became obvious that she was trying to cast a pellet and here you can see it beginning to emerge from her mouth.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"belted<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark 2, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

It escaped her beak..<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"belted<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark 2, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0and dropped to the snow-covered floor of the nest box.<\/p>\n

As is typical of most fish-eating birds, kingfishers lack a crop and their flexible gizzard is poorly musculatured and incapable of vigorous grinding.\u00a0 Though kingfisher nestlings digest the bones and scales of fish they consume they lose that ability when they fledge so as adults they throw pellets composed of entire fish skeletons and scales.\u00a0 It is assumed that this digestive change is explained by a change in gastric secretions from acid in nestlings to alkaline in adults.<\/p>\n

Their composition explains why the pellet of this species is almost white (composed of fish bones and scales as it is) as compared to the much darker pellets made up largely of arthropod exoskeletons or mammal fur of many other pellet-casting species.<\/p>\n

Pellets are often cast very quickly (as this one was) and I like to get multiple photos during the process but in the past shooting with my older Canon 7D usually left me frustrated because the burst rate of 8 frames\/sec was too slow to catch the pellet often enough as it fell.\u00a0 But shooting this sequence with my new Canon 7D Mark 2 with a burst rate of 10 frames\/sec was a significantly helpful 25% improvement.\u00a0 I was able to get\u00a09 images of the bird from when the pellet first appeared in the mouth until it dropped out of sight on the floor of the nest box.\u00a0 If I’d been using my 7D I’d likely have missed two of those shots and knowing my luck they’d have been the most desirable ones of the bunch.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

If you’re photo-geeky enough to be\u00a0interested in seeing\/hearing the speed I experience with the Mark 2 when I fire off a burst, check out this link<\/a> to a clip of the Mark 2 in action.\u00a0 Several shutter modes are demonstrated – the actual burst begins at about 30 seconds into the clip.\u00a0 To my knowledge this frame rate is faster than that of any other cropped sensor DSLR.<\/p>\n

Another thing I loved about the Mark 2 in this kingfisher\u00a0encounter was its improved buffer capacity.\u00a0 The buffer of my 7D fills up after 25 RAW images in a burst but the Mark 2’s buffer has a significantly improved capacity of 31 RAW images. I get a lot of “false starts” from the bird\u00a0when shooting pellet-casting because of multiple retching sessions before the pellet is actually cast and it’s very frustrating to have just fired off a burst during a false alarm and have my buffer already full when the real action begins.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"belted<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a01\/4000, f\/7.1, ISO 800, Canon 7D Mark 2, Canon<\/em> EF500mm f\/4L IS II USM +1.4 tc, not baited, set up or called in<\/strong><\/p>\n

After the kingfisher passed the pellet she turned around on the perch and took off to my left.\u00a0 As she did so I fired off another burst but in only one of those shots did I get a wing position that I really\u00a0like.\u00a0 Once again I’d have had fewer images to choose from and would have been less likely to get this wing position\u00a0if I’d been shooting with the significantly slower 7D.<\/p>\n

I’m surprised by how concave her belly is in this shot.\u00a0 I don’t have a lot of experience with kingfishers so perhaps this is a normal profile for them in flight.\u00a0 I just don’t know…<\/p>\n

So far, for the reasons mentioned and many others, I’m hugely impressed by the Mark 2 for photographing birds.\u00a0 I still haven’t been able to test the new camera much on birds in flight so I continue to fine-tune my autofocus settings for those types of shots.\u00a0 I also have not had a chance yet to properly evaluate noise levels at high ISO’s.<\/p>\n

And hopefully, the next time I get an opportunity with a kingfisher casting a pellet the bird will be much, much closer than this one was…<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

PS – Once again I apologize for the late post.\u00a0 More technical issues.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve been watching this female Belted Kingfisher from afar for several weeks now but in typical kingfisher fashion she has been unapproachable. But yesterday morning she partially atoned for her bashful ways and performed some interesting behavior for my camera.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":28084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,395],"tags":[2329,52,2331,490,68,2321,1008,137,2330,226,245],"class_list":["post-28080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-miscellaneous","tag-belted-kingfisher","tag-bird-photography","tag-buffer-capacity","tag-burst-rate","tag-canon-7d","tag-canon-7d-mark-2","tag-farmington-bay-waterfowl-management-area","tag-female","tag-megaceryle-alcyon","tag-nature-photography","tag-pellet"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/11\/belted-kingfisher-2382-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-7iU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28080\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}