If you want to hide and secretly watch the daily life of birds, you probably need a bird blind or a bird costume. If you aren’t up for looking like a Sesame Street character, Inks Lake State Park has a bird blind that you can easily get access to that will enable you to spy on bird’s to your heart’s content. They put out several bird feeders and a little pond to attract birds, to attract people, and there is a nice shooting gallery set up so that you can see or shoot photos of the birds in a pretty setting. The bird blind itself is an enclosed building with angled glass such that you can see out into the bright outside but the birds can’t see into the dark building.

There are screened windows and doors in the bird blind but other than that there is no forced ventilation and it can get a bit hot in there. So, having the day off Monday morning I made myself a thermos full of hot coffee and headed out to the state park to practice bird photography. I got there at about 8:30AM, but there were a couple of employees watering and weed-whacking which kept the birds away, so I had to wait about 20 minutes for them to finish up. I wasn’t the only one waiting as there was also a white-wing dove hanging out on a tree branch eying the bird feeders.

Soon I had the place to myself and the birds began to gather. There are a couple of hummingbird feeders at the blind and several plants that hummingbirds enjoy visiting, so I got to see about a dozen hummingbirds flittering around. Hummingbirds are very small and fast and seldom sit still, so they are very difficult to photograph. But I found that if I just waited them out instead of trying to chase them with my camera, I would have a better chance of catching them. Below are a couple of hummingbirds either fighting or playing near one of the feeders. There is some motion-blur which I think gives the image the appearance of action, at least that’s my story.

Getting focus on the hummingbirds was a real challenge, and I also had to shoot at high ISO to get a fast enough shutter speed to have a hope of capturing them in a photo. The above photo was shot at 1/2500 second and probably should have been faster. I spent a lot of time waiting for the hummingbirds to go after the flowering plants in the distance as I thought that made a better setting than the bright red plastic feeders. Below are some of my keepers.

There were several other species of birds at the feeder including some goldfinches. Below is a female that perched on the sunflowers beneath a bird feeder and I thought this made for a fantastic photo. It did take quite a while for her to face her head in just the right direction to get a good photo. I think she was probably a juvenile goldfinch as I observed a larger male bringing her seeds and feeding them to her.

I tried to capture the other birds in a natural looking setting but many of them preferred perching on the windmill frame or the bird feeders. Below are a couple of more birds that I thought were nice looking.

By 10:30 the bird blind was getting quite warm inside and my steady coffee drinking probably wasn’t helping the situation. The birds seemed to be getting less active as well as midday approached, so I decided to hike down to the lake and look around. The trail down to the lake is well shaded and there was a nice breeze so it was a welcome change from cooking in the blind. The lake was already teeming with people on this hot day, I took a few photos and headed home.