March ‘26 Birda Challenge
My first good shot of my favorite bird, the Belted Kingfisher.
The Challenge Begins
A few years back, my brother introduced me to birding. I hate to say that I am a “birder” because I don’t think I am very good at it. As best as I can tell, there are 4 aspects to birding: identifying birds visually, identifying birds audibly, finding/tracking birds, and photographing birds. Again, I am pretty new, so I am sure seasoned birders will tell me there’s a lot more to it than that, which - again - is why I don’t really like to consider myself a very serious birder.
With that said, I have really taken a liking to photographing birds. I can accept that I am not so good at the other aspects as long as I am good enough to get some decent photos. Photographing birds is so fun to me because of the immense challenge of getting a good shot. You have to be ready 100% of the time because you never know when your shot will appear and it very often disappears as soon as it arrives.
That’s where Birda piqued my interested. There are a lot of apps out there for tracking life lists or identifying birds, I use many of them. But Birda was advertised as the “Pokemon GO!” of bird apps, and that immediately caught my attention. Pokemon GO! was fun, but it eventually got boring because nobody wants to see screen shots of your pokemon. But get a cool shot of a bird, and that’s something people get excited about. Gamifying bird photography is a formula I can really get down with.
Every month Birda has challenges. In March the challenge was to log 30 species, a challenge that is easy for most birders. However, I wanted to add some extra layers to the challenge:
Take 30 photos of birds
Photos had to be sharp
Photos had to be in focus
Composition and exposure had to be decent enough to share the images
I was able to finish the challenge just in time with the 30th bird being in my own neighborhood. Highlights of the month were capturing a hunting Osprey with a fish in it’s talons during an overnight camping trip with my son and getting a cool photo of my favorite bird as my 29th (thought it was 30th!) bird for the month.
I hope you enjoy the photos below!
Notice how some are good photos, but many are just fairly basic photos. A technique I learned from shooting at the newspaper was to get your “bread and butter” shots first. In the case of shooting birds, that means getting a shot of the bird, then waiting for it to do something more interesting. Sometimes that initial photo is all you can get and it’s rough. Other times, you get lucky and the bird really puts on a show!
Each photo has a note of my interaction.
