A surprise visitor at our backyard..

Our little jungle

I went to my backyard to check on a family of cats.
Apparently, the dogs had sniffed out some kittens on the pandan leaves.
To my surprise, I found a bird's nest on the Bougainvilla tree which was planted by Michelle, my wife.
Upon closer inspection, I found two eggs inside it.

The bird's eggs...

There was a little commotion when I checked out the content of the nest.
In the distance, there was a Yellow Vented Bul Bul. 
I guessed that it was the mother that flew off after I opened the backdoor.. 

The female Bul Bul incubating her eggs

A game of patience... 

I've never captured a female bird nursing her chicks before.
And this was a great opportunity to do so.
The nest was almost at eye-level and since it was just a few feet behind my toilet on the ground floor, I thought it would be good to set up a hide and observe the Bul Bul.
I made some reference with a book by D&K on birds. 
Seems that it takes about 10 days for the eggs to hatch. And another 15 days for the chicks to grow its feathers..

The day finally came: Our Bul Bul's chicks

A new arrival..

So, there I was, preparing to go to work on Tuesday after a long break.
I noticed that the pair of Bul Buls were not around. 
And when I checked their nest, two chicks had just hatched.
Probably a few hours earlier.
I was very excited to see the featherless chicks that were huddled together.
Then, in the days to come, I set up a hide in my toiled and peeked out to get a good view of the chicks in their nest.
Each time they felt the bougainvilla tree vibrate, one of the feistier chicks would extend its neck out.
Then, the mother came with food.
This was repeated every 10 or 15 minutes.

The mother feeding its young

A new beginning: the proud momma and her chick

Eating machines...

It seems that the young Bul Buls are eating non-stop.
They have a voracious appetite with the parents working around the clock in search of food
I don't think this is an issue as the neighbourhood has an abundant supply of insects and larvaes.
It would be very interesting to observe the Bul Bul chicks in the days to come.. 

The Mangrove Whistler

Aaaahh.. That wonderful morning...
 I swapped the day off by taking my Canon EOS 7D, EF teleconverter 1.4x and my trusty EF400mm F5.6L for a walk around the neighbourhood's fence line.
This place has a healthy population of birds where anything from a small spider-catcher to an Eagle can be spotted if you are lucky.

The Mangrove whistler

Horrendous lighting conditions
To get the most out of it, you have to set your camera to the lowest ISO.
Lower sensitivity means a tighter and crispier shot.
This also yields you a sharper image.
The enemy for a bird photographer is low-shutter speed.
I set my Canon EOS7D to 1/1250sec.
This would guarantee a clear shot.
There's nothing much I could do about the ISO settings which I had set on 'Auto'.
To compensate for bad lighting conditions, the camera would use a higher-sensitivity light capture.
Your shots may end up 'grainy' and if you blow it up, the colour pixels are not as compact as the lower ISO settings.

The image at 70% crop

 Autofocus and F8
The AF sensor on my EOS7D would not operate with a 1.4x TeleconvertorII.
Apparently, there is not enough light for the sensors to activate autofocussing.
To me, its not an issue.
I've been working with manual focus on my macro shots.
On a long telephoto lens, its just a matter of 'eye-hand' coordination.
I managed to cap off six shots and out of the lot, two came out pretty decent.
A little tweaking on the Adobe Lightroom 4.2 had fixed the exposure...