Many people become alarmed or annoyed when birds start attacking their windows in spring. The male cardinal pecking at your window is fighting what he perceives as an intruder and is simply defending his territory—he doesn't understand that it's his own reflection. In fact, both males and females may do this, especially species that often nest close to houses, such as American Robins, Northern Cardinals, Chipping Sparrows, and Song Sparrows.
Try covering the outside of the window with netting or fabric so the reflection is no longer visible. You can also try drawing soap streaks across the window to break up the reflection. This territorial reaction may be so strong that the bird may exhaust itself, but it usually doesn't result in fatal injury.
"Aside from being one more thing to fiddle with, a zoom lens is a severe optical compromise. No, not in image quality; at the high end, the image through a zoom lens is as crisp and color-correct as that through a fixed eyepiece. The compromise comes with field of view. Field of view--the most valuable optical commodity at high magnification--is usually much larger for a wide angle fixed lens as for the zoom at identical magnification."I believe George is correct if you want to digiscope at eyepiece magnifications beyond 20X, but I don't do that. The maximum exit pupil comes from 80mm divided by 20X = 4mm of light (versus 2.6mm for 30X [even on fixed] and 2mm at 40X). Less light = slower shutter speeds = blurred images = the #1 complaint of new digiscopers.
My favorite picture from the morning took considerable time and effort. While making my first lap around the back pond at Nine Springs, I inadvertently flushed a large flock of waterfowl. Several dozen remained, including a male Northern Pintail. To get its picture, one hurdle was that I was on the wrong side of the light. I didn’t want to circle around and take the path along the stream (the shortest route) because three Sandhill Cranes had claimed it. Instead, I decided to go the long way and made a clock-wise circle around the pond to get where I needed to be. No worries, during the walk I would simply continue to bird.
Once close enough to the pond, I configured my tripod for low-angle work by removing the center post and flattening the legs so the scope would only be just a few inches above the ground. I always carry a small screwdriver in my camera pouch so I can make this tripod conversion in the field.
I still needed to advance another 20 yards toward the edge of the pond to have a chance at getting a photograph of the pintail. One wrong move and a hundred dabblers would reward me with failure - wooooooosssshhh! - from the rushing sound of hundreds of wings flapping at once. Actually, it’s still an awesome sight and sound, but something I would have made effort to avoid even if I hadn't been there to digiscope.
By belly-crawling and pushing the scope and tripod ahead of me, it took a half an hour to sneak up on the ducks. All I had to do was find an opening between the cattails so I could poke my scope lens through and hopefully come away with a decent picture. On a couple of occasions a few ducks saw my hand go for the shutter button, which momentarily raised the volume of their vocalizations...luckily for my efforts, they remained.
With any kind of wildlife photography, there’s only so much you can control and I wish the composition was a little better, sans foreground obstructions, but I still feel like I got away with a good one. I suppose I could have raised the tripod a little more, but I didn't want to take the increased risk of flushing the birds.
