Leave me alone!

 

Well, this explains my difficulty in deciding whether these birds are rainbow or coconut lorikeets. (Columbus Zoo)

Soras swim but don't have webbed feet. (Columbus Zoo)

Maybe the sora's long toes help it swim. The bird is about the size of a robin.

hadada ibises (Columbus Zoo)

dromedary camels (Columbus Zoo)

More of Poor Clyde, an African gray parrot

Amur tigers (Columbus Zoo)

pygmy goats (Columbus Zoo)

What's this?

There's something fishy about a wing.

There are two hadada ibises. Here's the next shot I took.

 

Two brown ibises

In general, ibises are medium-sized wading birds. The African hadada ibis is a brown bird, but it has a jaunty red stripe on its upper mandible.

hadada ibis (Columbus Zoo)

Hmm. Not entirely brown.

The North American white-faced ibis is also brown. (You know where this is going, right?)

white-faced ibis (Columbus Zoo, May 7, 2018)

I think the Zoo's two white-faced ibises hatched in 2018.

July 25, 2018

August 7, 2018

Where's the white face? It's part of the bird's breeding plumage. I hope to see breeding plumage in person later this year.

ABP - Always Be Preening

Birds spend a lot of time taking care of their feathers. All photos are from the Columbus Zoo.

African grey parrot

blue-winged teal

black crowned crane

hadada ibis

Sometimes it helps to have a partner. I suppose this is how some birds maintain the feathers on their heads and necks.

Humboldt penguins

trumpeter swan

Click any picture for a larger image.

Death of a Camera

I went to the Columbus Zoo October 9th, carrying both the Nikon D50 and Kodak Z1012. The Kodak takes fine pictures, but the Nikon SLR, which is older (~2006 vs. 2008), is a pleasure to use. The viewfinder is bright; manual zoom is easy; autofocus is fast; the shutter delay is brief; and the camera is quickly ready to take another picture. The Kodak is smaller and lighter; has twice as many pixels; and has a longer zoom, but the motorized zoom control is placed awkwardly on the back of the camera and it seems as though a minute passes before it's ready to take another shot.

I sometimes carry both cameras because of the Nikon's ease of use and the Kodak's ability to seemingly capture more detail.

Anyway, my first stop was the barn and goat yard. I took a couple of pictures with the Nikon, looked at them, and was surprised that they were all black. Lens cap on? No, there isn't one. A leftover manual setting from a previous trip? Hmm. I made sure the camera was set to automatic and took more shots, with the same result. Battery? I knew it was getting low, but it wasn't dead. Still, I decided the battery was the cause of the all-black images and put the Nikon back in the bag.

Here are some shots from that day:

Merten's water monitor

hadada ibis

Amur tiger

Asian elephant

At home I charged the battery and took a trip to the zoo the next week. The same thing happened, which was not good. What had I done? I fiddled around to no avail and pulled out the Kodak. I took two pictures before the camera shut down. I was ready for that and had a second battery... but I'd left it in the car. I called the trip a complete bust and went home.

I searched the Internet for causes of black pictures and followed some diagnostic steps. I concluded that the shutter works but the light/image sensor does not. What next?

The Nikon is not my camera; it's by brother-in-law's. He loaned it to me earlier this year as I was deciding how to replace the Kodak, which has failing buttons and controls. I had settled on a Canon in the same "advanced point-and-shoot" category as the Kodak when my brother-in-law told me the Nikon was mine as a long-term loan. Wow!

I had been secretly wishing for a better SLR, one with more pixels and better low-light performance, but SLRs cost a lot. (My reading tells me a camera's megapixels is less important than the size of the image sensor, but the D50 has only 6 megapixels vs. 12 for the Kodak.) Now that the D50 didn't work, I had an excuse to replace it with something better! My Internet searching for causes of black images also pointed me to the possibility of buying a used SLR, and that's what I did. My Nikon D7000, first produced in 2010, arrived this week, and I told my brother-in-law that I upgraded his camera.