A Blue Jay Makes Its Way Into My Yard

I have been trying to get a blue jay to come into the yard for a while now. Years actually. I have put up feeders and houses for them with no luck. I see them over in the neighbor’s yard quite a bit, but I can’t make a photo of that. Imagine my surprise when I saw two blue jays on the fence just before dinner Wednesday night. I quickly grabbed my camera from across the house hoping that they would still be there when I got back. I threw the camera into aperture priority mode with an ISO that was not to bad for my camera. I set it up to bracket knowing that this was the quickest way to get a picture. I didn’t want the birds to fly away while I was messing around with my settings. Once I had a bird on a fence photo I took a couple of seconds to dial my settings in. While I was doing that this bird flew down and grabbed a moth. When it flew back up to the fence it looked up at me as if to brag. I hadn’t eaten yet that night, but the blue jay had. I am always happy making a photo of an animal stationary. I would have been happy sharing the photo of the blue jay just sitting on the fence today. I love it when I can show some behavior though. Eating the moth most definitely counts as behavior. What a cool experience!

When The Light Fades

I saw this blue jay just before sunset. There was very little light in my backyard so I had to really had to get away from any settings that I would normally use. I had my 1.4x extender on my camera so I was at f/5.6. I don’t like to take the 7D Mark II up to high with the ISO so I stayed at 1/125th of a second for the photo. That really is not fast enough to capture movement. When it was just sitting on the fence I was at 1/80th of a second. When the blue jay flew down to get the moth I was nowhere near fast enough to stop the action. I quickly adjusted and made this shot. When it threw the moth up to eat it with moth dust flying everywhere I was still too slow though. Maybe this blue jay will come back again in better light.