On Wednesday, June 13, 2018, while trying to figure out why my tractor wouldn’t start after I turned it off for a moment, I noticed a pair of birds flitting in and out and perching on top of a dead tree trunk that I was going to have removed. I didn’t really get a chance to check the birds out until Sunday afternoon. It turned out that the birds are a nesting pair of Eastern Bluebirds. They have made an almost
perfectly round hole about four feet up from the ground. In addition, they have a hole in the back of the trunk at about five feet, along with a tunnel to the top of the trunk that they pop out of. What they have created is a natural bluebird house. How could anyone disturb that!
So, Sunday afternoon, I took my camera and plopped out on the newly mowed lawn, sitting about 40 feet from the tree trunk. I didn’t want to disturb or scare them away. After about 15 minutes, they became used to me just sitting there and started coming and going from their natural home. I took a series of photos of this cute pair. After editing the photos, I decided to create a slide show video.
The Technical Particulars…
All photos were taken during one afternoon session, from approximately 1:40 to 2:00 p.m., using a Nikon D7000; ISO 200; Nikkor AF-S 55-200mm f/4-5.6 ED DX lens set at 185mm and f8; 1/250 sec shutter speed. I was approximately 40 feet (12.2 meters) from the tree trunk. I felt that being any closer would keep them from their nesting tree.
All photo processing was done using Ubuntu Mate 18.04. Raw photos were uploaded and processed using Raw Therapee. The video was made using Photofilmstrip, which I installed from the Ubuntu Software Center.
I wanted to create a slide show of my bluebird photos and found Photofilmstrip, which creates videos from a set of still photos. It worked perfectly and was easy to use. I highly recommend it. The audio that accompanies the slide show are actual eastern bluebird calls and songs. I downloaded them from the Cornell University Ornithology Lab Web site.
You can check out my front yard neighbors at
To read more about Eastern bluebirds, check out the following Web sites:
Thanks for stopping by and reading.
Barbara
Handknits by Barbara 