Why birds?
In preparation for this trip, I knew I wanted to bring along a “real” camera, not just a phone. I’d never really learned to use one, and so I got one in early 2023 so I’d have plenty of time to practice. I bought a nice zoom lens for it, and went out and started learning how to adjust ISO, shutter speed, and aperture to get the correct exposure. I also learned about what sort of focal lengths would be best for what type of photography- wide lenses for landscapes, normal lenses for everyday life, and long lenses for wildlife. Walking around the park near our home in Anchorage, I started trying to take pictures of birds. It’s a fun challenge, as birds are constantly moving, from sun to shadow, from the top of the tree to the bottom, which was a great exercise in learning to to track a target and adjust exposure for it. I quickly found that the 12-100mm lens I had didn’t zoom in far enough, so I bought a cheap telephoto lens, a 75-300mm. After hearing about an uncommon White-Tailed Ptarmigan that was hanging out near Arctic Valley in Anchorage, and making 3 separate trips out there until I finally found it, I was hooked!
Chasing birds, or “birding” as it is called, soon became a bit of an obsession, and I found myself going all over town, trying to get a picture of as many different birds as I could. I started out in mid-February, and by the end of March I only had 25- there really aren’t that many birds in Anchorage during the winter! After a trip to Nebraska, a trip to the North Slope soon after that, and more searching around Anchorage, I had over 150 by the end of June, and the number has kept climbing since.
"Rules" to birding
There aren’t really any hard-and-fast rules to birding- if you like looking at birds, you’re a birder! That being said, there are a few rules of thumb: for a bird to count, it must be alive, uncaged and wild, and it must be detected by either sight or sound. I’ve decided that for me to add a bird to my list, I must take an identifiable photograph of it. It doesn’t need to be a great photo, but it needs to be clear enough to see that it’s an American Robin and not a Bald Eagle! This has turned out to be very helpful for me. As it turns out, there are a lot of birds that look very much like other birds, and having a picture means I can go back and compare my pictures to others online. Which brings me to the next big topic- Ebird.
Ebird and Merlin
Before the internet, most birders would keep track of what they have seen the old-fashioned way: pen and paper. They would list the species, number of birds of each species, and the location. Some birders would have binders full of notes, lists, and sketches. In 2002, Cornell University launched Ebird, an electronic way of keeping these lists. This data is then used to track bird populations all over the planet. As of 2024, over 100 million lists have been submitted. Photographs can also be submitted with your list. This data is publicly available, and scientists all over the planet use the data to track bird populations, migration patterns, and much more. Birders are highly incentivized to use this software, as it automatically keeps track of what birds you’ve seen in each country, state, and even county. My engineer brain loves it!
Cornell University has also released an app called Merlin. The app can listen to a bird song and identify it, much like Shazam can listen to songs on the radio and identify them. Merlin is a bit controversial as it isn’t always right, but it’s dang close. Together with Ebird, these two programs are affectionately known as the “Ivy-League Birding Software”. Merlin can also identify photographs of birds. It has been trained using machine learning with photos submitted through Ebird, and though I have extreme misgivings about machine learning, I can’t help but admit that it’s all pretty cool stuff.
The Process
As we travel through the Americas, I always have my camera ready for the next new bird species I might see. I mostly find birds at campsites and on hikes, but we also make some detours to places with rarer birds that are only found in certain areas. In any case, I take pictures of birds, make a checklist, submit it to Ebird, edit the photos, revise the checklist (remember that some birds look a lot like others? Sometimes it’s a lot of revising), and upload the photos. It takes a while, but it’s something to do on the road and it will be pretty cool to look back on all the lists and photos when we’re done! I’ve linked my Ebird account above, where you can see all the photos I’ve taken. Remember that they aren’t all good photos- I just need an identifiable one, and if I can get a great photo then that’s a bonus!
The Equipment
I started with an Olympus EM1-Mk2 camera, and shortly before the trip upgraded to an Olympus OM-1. There are lots of different cameras to choose from, but I chose this one for several reasons:
- For decades, Olympus has focused on having the best weather resistance of any camera manufacturer. This is very important to me as we’ll be in a lot of wet places, and I don’t want to have to worry about a little rain!
- Olympus focuses on wildlife photography. All the major manufacturers (Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Olympus, Fujifilm) do everything from wildlife to sports to landscape to video very well, but some have focused on some things over others. For example, Fujifilm focuses on having the best colors, Panasonic focuses on video features, Nikon focuses on sports, etc. Olympus has long focused on having the best autofocus and the best frame rate (lots of pictures per second, important for capturing the right moment) of any manufacturer.
- Olympus cameras and lenses are smaller and cheaper than the “big 3” of Canon, Sony, and Nikon. This is because instead of a standard “full-frame” sensor, Olympus (and some Panasonic cameras) use a “micro four-thirds” sensor, which is about a quarter of the surface area. The pros and cons of this get very complicated and if you are interested in this there are lots of debates on the internet, but it basically comes down to physical size of the lenses vs. image quality. The camera sizes are fairly similar, but the lenses are where the big differences lie. Again, there is a huge amount of debate about this, but my chosen lens is tiny compared to what I would consider an equivalent full-frame lens to be, as well as about a quarter of the cost and weight. As far as image quality goes, I honestly can’t tell the difference, and I don’t care because the pictures I get are good enough for me.
I use an Olympus 100-400mm lens, and I have a 1.4x teleconverter that is on the lens 99.9% of the time, making it a 140-560mm lens. Consider the “crop factor” of the smaller image sensor, which is 2x, and I have a 280-1120mm full-frame equivalent lens. This gives me a huge amount of reach for the tiny little birds way out in the distance! I also have along a 12-100mm lens, a 75-300mm lens that I’ll bring on longer hikes when the 100-400 is too big and heavy, and a 60mm macro lens. I really haven’t used any of the other lenses at all, and we’ll see if I actually decide to ever leave the 100-400 behind!
Ebird
You can see all the photos I’ve uploaded to Ebird here: Ebird photos
I’ll also be adding some of the best ones below, and of course in the blog posts.
