Three Goals

A late-morning visit to West Bay today, with three main goals. One, find a Black Redstart; two, see if any Purple Sandpipers have turned up yet; three, test out my new field recorder.

1. Fail. None in the obvious places, but I'm sure I'll come across one here before the winter is out.

One of three Stonechats along the River Brit, West Bay.

2. Score! Two Purple Sands along the rock armour of the West Pier, a favourite spot...

A quick record shot when I first clapped eyes on them...

...and then they posed like this. Sublime.

Photographing birds is a funny old game. Initially the Purps were in almost constant motion, scuttling about and feeding. The typical nightmare-to-photograph scenario. Then a breaking wave had them both airborne, and for some reason they plonked down together on that lump of granite and just stood there. Initially they were back-on, but suddenly posed as shown in the photo. Perfect. Hoping the depth of field was sufficient to get both in focus, I popped off a burst. A shutter speed of 1/250 is nowhere near enough to guarantee hand-held sharpness at 1600mm zoom, but that's what f6.3 and ISO 720 gave me. Apart from the odd blinking eye, all ten shots in the burst look similar. Except that some are noticeably less sharp. This is the best. Three minutes and twenty seconds elapsed between my first photo and the last, but I bet I could have spent another hour with those birds and not had them sit together so nicely again.

3. Success. For a while I've been wondering about buying a recorder specifically for constant use while birding. My Zoom H4n Pro is a nice bit of kit for noc-mig, but feels like overkill for in-the-field use. I do find it rather bulky as well. I fancied something small and simple, into which I could plug my EM272 clippy lavalier mic. This seemed to fit the bill...

Zoom F1 Field Recorder.

So I slotted in a memory card, adjusted everything as needed - or so I thought - and fired it up. But I had accidentally left the record level at its default setting, which is 'Mid'. Spotting this error later, I proceeded to rectify things. However, it doesn't go from 'Mid' straight to 'Hi'. No, we have 'Mid+', then 'Hi-', then 'Hi'. Oh, and then we have 'Hi+'. Er...also 'Hi++'! So now I was wondering if I had managed to record anything audible at all. I need not have worried. A calling Oystercatcher had flown past more than 200m behind me earlier, heading east. A fairly scarce bird at West Bay. Out of sight too quickly to get a photo, but had the F1 caught it?

Yes...

Anyway, I've been out in the garden cabin this afternoon, running a little test to compare my EM272 clippy mic with the Zoom lavalier mic that comes with the recorder. Results anon, but my initial impression is that the supplied mic is perfectly adequate for field recording. You would still need to buy a decent hairy ('dead cat') windshield though. The Zoom mic just comes with three of the foam jobbies you see clipped to the lapel of TV personalities.

So that's two future NQS posts that I need to get my finger out for: Nikon P950 flight shot set-up, and Zoom F1 for constant recording. Watch this space.

But not too closely. At least go and have a beer or something meantime...