New Photo Gallery

Greetings and Happy Friday to all the thousands of readers out there in cyberland . Thanks for once again tuning into the 600 Birds Blog.
I've got a few updates to share with you.
First off, I've moved my gallery of digiscoped photos here. This new space is easier to upload photos to and also more convenient for re-sizing and tweaking them. You'll find more images here than I had on the old Flickr site and it will be updated more regularly.

On a separate note, iconic blogger and fellow Eagle Optics employee Mike McDowell will now be bringing his wonderful insights and photographs to the Eagle Optics Blog. Follow that link to some great footage that Mike recently captured of a Barred Owl tranquilly sipping water from a puddle. The cool thing about that footage is that it was shot through a pair of 8x32 Swarovski EL binoculars.

Harlequin Duck

I was sorting out photos today (lots of them) and came across this nice photo of a Harlequin Duck that I took in Alaska this spring. Here in Wisconsin, we can occasionally see these birds way off in the distance, bobbing among the waves of Lake Michigan. On some of Alaska's inland streams, one is able to get nice close up looks of this spectacular bird.
Enjoy!

Midwest Birding Symposium...you really should attend.

Follow this link for a quick 22 reasons why you should be in Ohio this September. I've even managed to convince my wife to attend this event, which happens to fall on our 10-year anniversary. Like I told her, it will be fun AND romantic!

Digiscoping VS DSLR

Wow, I've been absent from this space for awhile and for those 3 or 4 readers that may still be following 600 Birds, thanks for hanging in there. For parents in particular, summers tend to be time vacuums filled with lazy days at the local pool, camping trips, canoe trips, family reunions, soccer leagues, etc, etc... (notice that I didn't mention blogging in the aforementioned activities))

Even though I have been slacking as of late, many of the other birding bloggers out there have stayed the course and are producing insightful and regular postings, most of which I check in on daily. Some of them even have kids.

One of those bloggers who seems to be able to pull off amazing feats of travel, publishing, blogging, business running, kid parenting, bird festival organizing, keynote speaking, music playing, etc..etc...etc... is Bill Thompson. This brings me to the point of this post. Bill recently got back from a trip to Trinidad and recently blogged about his experience digiscoping with the new Leica Televid spotting scopes, and how that rig performed compared to his DSLR. For the full scoop, I recommend you check out the latest post at Bill of the Birds.

I've also been digiscoping with one of these new Leica spotting scopes and they are truely superb. I haven't gotten around to editing newer shots, post-processing, cropping, etc... but when I do, rest assured you can see more here. For now though, I've got to get the kids to horse camp.