Gobblers, Bucks, and Bluebirds

The Eastern Wild Turkey is one of my favorite subjects to photograph during the spring months and I have spent many hours afield filming and photographing them this year.  I love to capture the gobblers as they perform the courtship display and for a time from mid-April thru mid-May I saw them doing this almost every day.  One thing I love about video is the ability to get dramatic close-ups at very long range, but with that being said I am not happy until I get a good supply of still photos each spring and on a few occasions this year, they came close enough for excellent still portraits.

I also like to document the development of the antlers of the whitetail bucks.  I have seen a few bucks with branch antlers so far.  I was not able to get still photos of them, but I have photographed a few that have not yet branched.  The first buck pictured below was a small rack buck last year with four or five points so he should grow a decent rack this year.

2nd Year Rack Buck

This deer has only partially changed from the winter to the summer coat and looks very ragged, but the buck below has almost completed the shedding process.  He was a small spike last year and should grow a respectable rack this year.

Another Prospective Rack Buck

While waiting for the deer and turkeys to appear I am always looking for other subjects to photograph and one morning a bluebird caught an earthworm in the meadow in front of me and flew to a limb and paused with it before flying on to its' nest with it.

Bluebird With Earthworm

 All photos were taken with the Canon 5D MKIII and the 600mmF4.0 IS L lens.

Originally posted at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.

Late Summer Whitetails-Pre-rut Begins

With all the coverage of the changes coming to Winslow Hill, I have not posted anything but elk related material since mid-August.  I like photographing whitetail deer as much or more than I do elk and spend far more time around deer than any other species.  With that being said, most of the bucks in my area are not exceptionally large so I have to travel to find the truly large racks. For many years Shenandoah National Park was my favorite destination for that purpose, but that abruptly ended in 2012 when most of the bucks at Big Meadows were collared and several of the mature bucks vanished.

I only took one trip to SNP this summer, which was in late August, just before the velvet was shed.  We saw a few spikes and does, but deer were very scarce.  The trip was made worthwhile; however, by an encounter with a beautiful buck that had thirteen points if you go by the Boone and Crockett 1" rule, or fourteen if you count any protrusion.

Superb 13-Point: Canon 5D MK III-Canon 100-400mm L IS II@349mm-ISO 400-1/400 sec. f 6.3

Even this buck had not escaped the heavy hand of man as he was fitted with a small ear tag, which was easily removed in Photoshop. Yes, I plead quilty-- I have no compunction at all about cloning out an object on wildlife which should never have been there in the first place.

In the old days I would have returned and attempted to photograph him shedding the velvet, but I stayed home this year and the local bucks were difficult to see. I only filmed a small spike that was in the process of shedding his velvet, but one should not pass up an opportunity just because an animal is young and small. Spikes can make large bucks in later years if they survive.  "Once a spike-always a spike" is simply a statement that is not true in many if not most cases.

Yearling Buck Sheds Velvet: Canon 5D MK III-Canon 100-400mm L IS II@ 300mm-ISO 640-1/320 sec. f  5.0

On a beautiful, cool morning earlier this week I photographed an eight-point that had shed his velvet completely.

8-Point Buck: Canon 5D MK III-Canon 100-400mm L IS II@300mm-ISO 1000-1/125 sec. f 5.0

Pre-rut activity is underway and movement patterns are changing.  I filmed this buck with the GH4 making a scrape and horning tress soon after I took the photo above and have filmed one other buck doing this as well.

The pre-rut will intensify through October until the full-blown rut erupts in late October or early November.

Originally published at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.

Attention Shifts To Whiterails As Turkey Activity Dies

Mid to late May and turkeys may still be seen, but gobbling activity is really dying down.  It is still possible to hear a gobbler or see one strutting, but one is more likely to spend a morning without hearing one and when they do see a mature bird it is most likely to be feeding. 

Leaving The Meadow: Canon 7D-Canon 18-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS STM @ 118mm-ISO 400-1/200 sec. f 6.3

Mature Gobbler: Canon 7D-Canon 55-250mm f 4.5-5.6 IS STM @ 250mm -ISO 400-1/400 sec. f8.0

I normally use Canon L lenses for most of my photography, but I have used two non-L lenses quite a bit this spring.  The Canon 70D does an excellent job at shooting video, as it has superb auto-focus in video mode instead of the slow, hunting auto focus that was the norm in previous versions.  This was unusable for wildlife filming so I always filmed in manual focus mode.  The focusing problem was solved with the 70D and in fact may have been solved with the Rebel T4i or 5i, but I never tried those as they did not have the 3x crop mode.

At any rate focusing is now very acceptable with the exception that the built in microphone or a shotgun mike mounted on camera picks up the noise of the focus motor.  There are some work arounds for this including putting the mike off-camera, but the solution with the least hassle is using Canon  STM lenses which were built to give silent operation in video mode.  The downside is there are only a few models of these  lenses and they do not use premium quality glass or construction. They are available only in the EF-S mount and must  be used only on crop-sensor Canons.  I acquired used copies of the  18-135mm f 3.5-5.6 IS STM and  55-250mm 4.5-5.6  IS STM  lenses this spring from KEH in Atlanta, Georgia.

Both lenses perform very well for video and they do a decent job at still photography.  It seems that my copy of the 18-135mm is a bit better built than the 55-250mm, but I really have no complaints about either considering that the 55-250 cost less than $300.00, while the 18-135 was under $350.00.  They do not have the stinging sharpness of the L lenses for still photos and I miss the wider maximum f stop of lens like the 70-200mm f 2.8, but of course when needed one can still use the L lenses when needed in video mode and use work-arounds for the sound.  The STM lenses were instrumental in causing me to use the old 7D quite a bit more this spring for still photograhy than I usually would have,  as it was common to have whichever lens which was not on the 70D mounted on the 7D and lying close at hand.

I take few landscapes, but I used the 18-135mm for many of those that I did take. It compares  well with lenses such as the 28-135mm IS in EF mount on a full frame camera,  as with the 1.6 sensor crop factor of the 7D--70D, etc. this lens has a focal length equivalent of  about 29mm--216m.

Late Evening : Canon 7D-Canon 18-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS STM @ 18mm-ISO 400-1/125 sec-. f 8.0

My attention is shifting to the whitetail deer as turkey activity winds down,  the time for the birth of the whitetail fawns is at hand and  bucks with significant antler growth are appearing.

New Growth : Canon 7D-Canon 18-135mm f3.5-5.6 IS STM @ 135mm-ISO 400-1/200 sec-. f6.3

The one below is the largest I have seen so far this spring.  In my experience bucks in our area that are this size now usually make bucks of eight points or more by early July.  Both bucks are at least two years old. This photo below is also  the only one shown today that was taken with an L (600mm) lens and the 5D MK III.  At first glance it may not look  as good as those taken with the 7D and STM lenses, but this is a photo that could not have been taken with those lenses.  It was very early and the buck was much farther away than the one above.  In retrospect I should have started at ISO 1600 and tried a lower shutter speed, but I fired a few frames at ISO 3200 first and it had the most pleasing pose so I posted it today, but the frames taken at ISO 1600 showed less grain and better sharpness.

Mature Buck : Canon 5D MK III-Canon 600mm F4 IS L-ISO 3200-1/160 sec-. f5.0

Hopefully I will have some young fawn photos to post soon. Some fawns in this area are born as early as Mid-May, but the bulk are born during the first two weeks of June so I should be seeing them any day now.

Originally posted at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.

Summer Whitetails

Whitetail Buck Feeding in Oats Field: Panasonic GH 3-Canon 500mm F4 I-ISO 400 1/80 sec. f?

 I have frequently expounded on the subject of bull elk and whitetail bucks spending most of the year either alone or in bachelor groups, with mid to late-summer being the time when these groups seem to be the most visible. Whitetail bucks are especially difficult to see in summer if they remain in the woodlands, but as summer gets underway and small grains ripen,  the bucks become much more easily visible as they visit fields in early morning and evening to feed.  Corn attracts them as well, but the deer are not easily visible in the tall corn. Quality grasses such as alfalfa and clover may provide sustained whitetail sightings throughout the summer, but it seems the best opportunity for seeing a lot of bucks is when the animals concentrate at a grain field.

Barley is the first to ripen in late June to early July, while wheat comes a bit later, and oats peak by late July and early August.  If these grains are in food plots devoted to wildlife where they are left stand, then viewing can be excellent for an extended period, but in the case of grains planted in commercial farming operations, there is a short window of peak opportunity.  There is little use of the grain while it is still green, but grazing increases as the grain gets that "golden" look and peaks about the time it is ready for harvest.  Any delay in harvesting means a monetary loss to the farmer so the grain is cut as soon as possible after it is ripe.  Animals may continue to graze on forbs and grasses, in the stubble ground unless the farmer immediately plows this down, but if other grains that mature later are in the area, the animals will concentrate on each variety as it reaches its' peak period of attractiveness as a food source.

One farm that I watch provided good whitetail video opportunities at a wheat field, but the farmer had planted bearded wheat to lessen its' attractiveness to deer and it worked to a certain extent.  I still saw some good bucks, but they were always at long range.  Soon that field was harvested and activity plummeted, so I shifted my attention to a nearby field that was divided between grass and a strip of oats.  Several whitetails were using this, but most of the bucks were small and they were quite spooky. There was one nice eight-point and I watched for a few mornings and evenings before I  got a fairly close shot at him with the 500mm F4 on the evening of July 24th, but he was still far enough away that I cropped the image significantly to get the composition I wanted.

Eight-Point In Oats: Panasonic GH 3-Canon 500mm F4 I-ISO 400 1/60 sec. f?

Soon the oats were at their peak, and whitetail sightings increased dramatically, but this was not to last, as the farmer finished cutting the barley and wheat in the area and it seemed likely this field was  next on the agenda when I arrived before dawn one morning to find the combine and baling equipment parked in a staging area convenient to the field.  That morning yielded some good video clips, but no good still opportunities.

I was certain the oats would be cut on the next morning, but decided to go there anyway as deer would still likely be found in the stubble at dawn. I parked my Bronco and walked through the staging area on the way to my stand at the edge of the oats field. The large tractors and combine looked like  prehistoric monsters as I passed by them in the faint light of early dawn.   To my amazement they had not been moved since my last trip and it turned out that the field was not yet cut. This morning was simply amazing.  I am not sure how many bucks I saw, as some moved across the field rapidly and at a distance, but there were several rack bucks.  Counting spikes and four points there had to be 10-12 bucks in the field that morning.  Soon most of the deer had left the field, and the first rays of the sun were touching the highest part of the field when a nice buck walked into the field almost 400 yards away, soon to be followed by another.  The action broke my way this time and the bucks came across the grass to the oats strip and  began feeding.  The only problem was that they were still 200 yards away.  This is great for video, but is a bit far for good still photos.  I already had the 1.4X extender mounted on the 500mm, so I shifted the GH3 to still mode, and took several frames of each buck.

Wide 7 Point: Panasonic GH 3-Canon 500mm F4 I-ISO 200 1/60 sec. f ?

High-Narrow 7 Point: Panasonic GH 3-Canon 500mm F4 I-ISO 200 1/60 sec. f ?

As it turned out, the combination of the 500mmf4 and 1.4x extender on the GH3 did a very creditable job of capturing the bucks, This was the last morning to film and photograph the bucks before the oats was cut.  On the following morning it was a stubble field with windrows of straw running through it. There were still a lot of deer  for a short time after day break, but the light was flat as the sky was milky from an approaching front, and none of the bucks got in position for still photographs, although I did a lot of video filming.

These bucks were not as large as the best Shenandoah National Park has to offer but they were 148 miles closer to home and best of all they did not have the horrible collars that have been inflicted on many of the Shenandoah deer since last summer.

Originally published at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.

Shenandoah National Park: A Morning To Remember

On Thursday morning my brother Coy and I traveled to Shenandoah National Park in Virginia, in search of whitetail bucks in velvet and any other photogenic wildlife that we might find.  Visit Coy at Country Captures for a detailed description of the events of the morning and to see some of his photographs. Shortly after dawn we found a bachelor group of bucks coming into the meadow from the Tanners Ridge area.  I started by shooting video from the roadside with a Canon T3i and 70-200mm lens, but soon went into the meadow to get a better angle and alternated between this rig and the Canon 7D with the 300mm F2.8.  If I needed a wider shot I put the T3i in manual still mode and used it with the 70-200mm.  In the photo below I shot handheld with this rig and image stabilization engaged to get a photo with several bucks together (the 7D and 300mm F2.8 was on the tripod at the time).

Portion Of Bachelor Group Big Meadows

 Three of the bucks fed quite near to me and I photographed one extensively with the 7D and 300mm F2.8. This buck should have been a ten-point but the brow tine was broken and one of the points on the left beam did not develop beyond a small bump, so he had five points on one side and only three on the other.

Unusual Antler Configuration

At one point a beautiful nine-point  came into range and I pressed the T3i and 70-200mm into service again to get a photograph that included the entire deer. This photo was taken at 200mm and is a vertical crop taken from the center of a horizontal shot as is the photo above.  This is not increasing the size of the deer in the composition, but rather removing the unneeded sides of the photo, although both photos do make decent horizontal ones also.

Shenandoah Nine-Point At Big Meadows

As exciting as photographing the bucks was, it was eclipsed by the arrival of a Coyote which came from the west side of the drive and ran up Skyline Drive toward the camp store and then into the meadow.  We found it near a large herd of deer, which were very skittish and fearful of it.  At first we thought it had killed a fawn, but it turned out that it was feeding on blueberries.  After taking video with the T3i and 500mm F4 lens, I attached the 7D and took several stills.

Coyote Pauses From Eating Blueberries

Coyote Looks Hostile, But He Wasn't Hunting Fawns Today

Coyotes and black bears do make significant inroads in fawn populations, but I think this is more likely to occur in late May and June when the fawns are small.

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Originally posted at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.

Summer Bucks-It's Not All About The Megapixels

Whitetail Antlers Are Fully Developed By Early August

The antlers on the mature whitetail bucks are  completely grown by early August and  many of the larger ones will lose the velvet by the end of the month.  Pennsylvania Bull elk lose the velvet even earlier with most of them shedding by mid-month.  Because of this, early August is a favorite time to travel to Shenandoah National Park to photograph bucks in velvet at Big Meadows, since it is good to be in Pennsylvania Elk Country a bit later on to document the shedding of the velvet.

I was recently going through my files from 2006 and reworking some of the better photographs.  Doing so brought to mind a statement that Jim Borden made in a recent post about the quality of a photograph not being all about megapixels.  He was talking about noise in that particular instance, but it still made me think about just how good images from the old Canon 10-D could be when the light was right and everything else came together.  It was only 6.3 megapixels and had severe noise problems in low light, but I held on to it for more years than I should have because of the expense of buying video equipment.  Both the 20-D and 30-D were much better at handling nose, but I passed them by and didn't upgrade until the 40-D came out in the fall of 2007.  The following summer the 40-D malfunctioned at the peak of the fawn photography season, and I bought a refurbished 30-D  to fill the gap and I used it and the 40-D about  equally until the 7-D came out.  The bottom line: however, was that I forgot just how good the 10-D actually was until I started through the 2006 photographs and redone some of them in CS5.  I am not quite sure whether it is because earlier versions of Photoshop did not produce as good results as CS5 does or if the main difference is that I understand Photoshop better--it likely is a combination of the two.  One cannot crop the images as severely as the higher megapixel cameras without the image falling apart, and perhaps printing large enlargements would show a significant difference, but it was a good camera for it's day and it did not have the focusing issues that the 7-D can have under certain situations.

Here is another Shenandoah buck from the same day.  This is not the largest buck I have seen in the park, but he was very impressive.  I don't think the photograph is as good as the first one, because of the right side of the face being shadowed. 

An Outstanding Shenandoah Buck

Be sure to visit Jim and Joan Borden's blog JJ Wildlife Photography for excellent photographs and writing.  Jim is a seasoned, experienced outdoorsman and photographer with an excellent understanding of the technical aspects of photography as well as a deep knowledge of wildlife behavior.  A visit to his blog is time well spent.

Originally posted at Pennsylvania Wildlife Photographer by Willard Hill.

Camera Critters: Summer Whitetails-The King

After a solid string of posts featuring the "Eastern Wild Turkey, we dig into the archives for some shots of mature whitetail bucks from the past.

The first and last photographs were taken at Big Meadows in Shenandoah National Park in 2004. These photos (with the exception of the 2nd) were taken with a Canon 10-D, which was my first DSLR, and the Canon 100-400mm L zoom.

Mature 10-Point: 2004

I photographed the buck below for the first time in the autumn of 1999 when he was already a mature, beautiful eight-point.

He was the most commonly seen buck at Big Meadows for several years. Billie Cromwell looked at his photograph and said "He looks like a King surveying his domain", so I named him "King". While he was not the largest buck I saw there, he became like an old friend and I learned a lot about whitetail behavior by observing and photographing him over the years.

King in 1999: Rebel X Sigma 170-500mm: Negative film scanned to Photo CD by Kodak

He did get somewhat larger than the photo above, attaining either ten or eleven points at one time. By 2004 he was going down hill, but was still a beautiful buck. If I recall correctly, I saw him for the last time during the rut of 2006 when he had lost most of his antler mass and had a decidedly "geriatric" appearance.

King in 2004

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