Kingfisher Encounter: back to the basics of digiscoping

Belted Kingfisher Female

Every once in a while it is good to return to our roots. Digiscoping roots that is. Last week, while attending the Space Coast Birding and Nature Festival in Titusville Florida I decided to dig out my Sony DSC N1 (a small 8 mega pixel digital point and shoot camera with a touch screen and selective spot focus), my Digital Camera Adapter (the Carl Zeiss swing in/swing out platform adapter), and dust off my Zeiss Diascope 85FL with wide-field fixed power eyepiece and do some traditional digiscoping. (For the basics on digiscoping, see Point and Shoot for Wildlife.)

Since my trusty (not!) cable release was broken (3rd one I have broken), I was even without my usual Universal Cable Release Bracket and had to actually push the button directly on the camera for every exposure.

The deal with the swing arm platform bracket is that it holds the camera fairly steady behind the eyepiece while capturing, but swings out of the way to focus and observe. Digiscoping using this rig means 1) finding the bird, 2) setting up the tripod and scope, 3) finding the bird in the scope (with the camera swung out of the way) and focusing, 4) swinging the camera in, 5) pressing the shutter release half way so the camera will focus through the scope, 6) waiting on the bird to do something interesting, and 7) squeezing off the shot.

Inelegant but sometimes effective.

Of course it requires a cooperative bird.

That whole routine is one reason, when the kingfisher who had been ahead of me, post to post and bush to bush, as I drove the Blackpoint Wildlife Drive loop at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, decided to perch up on the mangroves right across a 20 foot channel from the road, I pulled up, grabbed some shots with the H50 out the window, and then sat and debated with myself for a good 5 minutes.

Belted Kingfisher in Context

It was a kingfisher after all. A Belted Kingfisher. They never sit. They are flighty and the slightest disturbance, let alone a large human getting out of car, digging out tripod and scope, setting up tripod, etc. etc., sends them on to happier hunting grounds around the bend, on the back side of whatever cover they can find.

Was it worth getting out?

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. The light was all but perfect.  I did all that.

And I got set up without the bird flitting. And I got focused and took perhaps the best shot of my life of a Kingfisher. Then I zoomed in and took an even better shot.

Belted Kingfisher side view

The short of it is that I worked that bird for the better part of an hour and moved on before she did. I photographed it at all powers, on three different perches as she fished. I came back with over 50 exposures of that bird…any one of which was better by a factor of 10 than any Belted Kingfisher shot I had ever taken before.

It was a magical hour. I spent it totally amazed. Blessed. 

And I was reminded once more that one of the major attractions of digiscoping is that, given the right bird and the right light, it can be done with minimal equipment.

Over the course of several trips to Blackpoint Drive and one morning at Viera Wetlands, I got reaquainted with my basic digiscoping rig, and found that I liked it again. I liked the results even better. 

An American Bittern at Viera Wetlands.

American Bittern

A Tricolored Heron at BPD.

Tricolored Heron

Least Bittern at Viera.

Least Bittern

And one final Kingfisher.

Kingfisher looks at fotog

Sometimes it is good to go back to basics. Simple point and shoot. Spotting scope. Bracket. Digiscoping at its best.