This past week I received an order from Amazon.com containing a Christmas present that I bought for myself (sure, it's a few weeks late, but better late than never). It's a blind for watching and photographing my birds (and any other wildlife that might present itself). It's the Ameristep Doghouse blind. I've been pondering the purchase of this particular model for a while, as well as some of the other models that Ameristep sells, but I finally decided on this one based on size (2 people can fit in it pretty comfortably, although I haven't field-tested that yet!), ease of set-up, and cost. I also looked at the Outhouse model, but decided I didn't really need one quite that tall.
Here's another view.
The dogs (well, mainly Jupiter) were curious about it, and when I first set it up today, Jupiter smelled all around it and then plopped down right outside the door. I wasn't terribly worried that she would "blow my cover", but I was worried that the ground-feeding birds, my primary "target" for the day, wouldn't be terribly comfortable with her sitting there.
Eventually I convinced both dogs that they should just hang out on the deck and stand guard from there.
They soon fell asleep on the job, though:
One thing that became painfully clear to me while I was photographing the birds is that I need a bigger/longer lens. I had to set up pretty far back from the feeders because that was the closest open spot large enough to accommodate the blind, and my 55-200mm lens just didn't cut it for covering the distance between me and the birds.
For example, I got lots of photos like these:
This little Goldfinch happened to land in a tree very close to my blind, though.
All the rest of the bird photos have been cropped/zoomed so you can actually make out the bird.
Here's a handsome male Dark-eyed Junco.
The Juncos have been surprisingly low in numbers at our feeders this year. Not sure why. Here's another male, this one with a bit of an anomaly - he has a white ring around each eye. Now that I think about it, I might share these photos with the Cornell Lab.
And here's a pretty little girl Junco:
Another common ground-feeding visitor is the White-Throated Sparrow:
We have both the white-striped and tan-striped morphs of these birds at our feeders, although the white-striped form is MUCH more common.
Here's the tan-striped morph (I think!):
And like I said, if any other wildlife happens to pass by, I'll try to capture it. Like this little guy:
I'm looking forward to taking my blind out and about away from the house to see what else I can photograph.
