WaldenPond: Stalking the Swallow-tailed Flycatcher

with a $77 Lens!!! :-)

I was just screwing around on eBay and bid $77 for an AutoFocus Nikon 70-210 f4-5.6 lens

AND WON!!! It arrived today. I decided to test it on the elusive swallow-tailed flycatcher that I had been unable to approach with my 18-135 lens. The new lens doesn't seem to focus as fast as the 135 but that's to be expected;

there's a lot more lens to focus. And, if I prefocus to "near-focus" it snaps into focus prettty quickly. Here's a series of shots, starting with it sitting on our pier. This shot shows the color. Its underbelly is a pale orange that I keep trying to get with the sun shining on it. The picture to the left shows how long the split tail is. I guess that helps with the impressive display of acrobatic flying

. It jumps straight up, catches a fly (or bug), flashes that orange belly and alights softly on a perch. The flycatcher seems to hover over a victim, then strike; some really cool flying. With my $77 lens, it doesn't stand a chance of escaping my stalking. :-)

And in this

final image, though less than absolutely sharp, the scissor shape is much more obvious. By the way, the swallow-tailed flycatcher is also known as the scissor-tailed flycatcher. It is the state bird of Oklahoma. Just in case it does evade my stalking, I will return to eBay in search of a 300mm f4 (or faster) lens. Jane's gonna kill me.