While I love this blog, I now pretty much only write on my other two blogs: BirdingBlogs.com and 10,000 Birds - I would love to see you there!

Saturday 9 May 2009

Tree Pipit videoscoped in Mieming, Tirol, Austria

So I now have a little HD videocamera to play with, so I hooked it up to my Swaro scope and took it out to play in the woodlands on the Mieminger Plateau (just above Telfs, west of Innsbruck). Being my first day videoscoping, I did not expect much, and it took a little while to get used to the whole setup. I'll write a review of the camera and setup when I get back from Kazakhstan.

At one stage, I flushes a pipit off the ground in an Austrian Black Pine woodland. Looks like a female Tree Pipit Anthus trivialis. She seems to be showing a brood patch which is why I am guessing it is a she.




Tree Pipit videoscoped in high definition using a Swarovski ATM80HD scope, a 25-50x zoom ocular eyepiece, the UCA adaptor, and a Panasonic SD100 camcorder.

I am pretty happy with the results, and it looks really great on my TV and computer. Unfortunately, I had to reduce the quality for YouTube, but it is still not too bad for my first time videoscoping birds.

Happy birding,
Dale Forbes

11 comments:

Sharon said...

Very nice...you should be proud:)

SAPhotographs (Joan) said...

Congrats on the videocam Dale, you are going to have a lot of fun with it as they are excellent for elephants too. :)

Ginnymo said...

Great video. Cute bird too Dale!! I have a mini digital video cam but never use it because I have video on my camera. I really should drag it out and practice. It does have 25 X zoom on it.

Kelly said...

...very nice! He's so cute...he looks so close... impressive.

Dale Forbes said...

Hi Sharon, thank you for the support.

Joan, elephants are super cool! (did you ever read the essay I wrote on them and posted on my blog?). I now look back and think how cool it would have been to have videoed the huge roaming army ant swarms I [occasionally] saw in Costa Rica - they would eat everything in their path and cover almost a hectare of land at a time!

Ginny, the video camera sounds ideal for your window - with a 25x zoom and a pillow for support, you might be able to get some cool video of the creatures.

Hi Kelly, the pipit was videoed at about 40m I suppose. 50x magnification and the optics of the scope are incredible, so it really adds to the vibrance of the image.

Redzlan said...

Beautiful movie of preening Pipit!.

Chris said...

Yes that's right, I think you should be proud of yourself, it is a very nice video!!

SAPhotographs (Joan) said...

That is an extremely interesting essay Dale.

Yes, elephants have been a great debate over the years and is not a subject I easily discuss as each person has their own beliefs as far as culling, destruction of habitat etc is concerned. I think you did well to convey the essence of the problems concerning them.

Those videos of the ants would have been fantastic. Hindsight!! :)

Unknown said...

I have never heard of videoscoping before, this is awesome and innovative way of observing and recording bird behavior. WOW

pepe said...

Hi Dale,

the "UCA adaptor"...
is ist to buy in a normal shop, or is it for "insiders" only?
I cann't find it in the "German Swarovski List"!

kind regards
pepe

Dale Forbes said...

Hi Pepe, I am not surprised that the UCA is not on the Swaro website yet as it has only just been introduced to the press (which is what the Kazakhstan trip was all about).

I planned to write all about it this afternoon on my blog, but I think I will have to put it off for another day or two as I desperately need to catch up on some of my video editing...

Thank you for stopping by and commenting...