Bird Watching with a Cell-phone? Samsung S23 Ultra is like having a telephoto lens in your pocket. + FOY Am. Woodcock

Bird Watching with a Cell-phone? Samsung S23 Ultra is like having a telephoto lens in your pocket. + FOY Am. Woodcock

This weekend, I had picked up a new phone - its a Samsung S23 Ultra. Its a Samsung "flagship" phone - which I have never really owned --- I had the mid-range Samsung A series phones.  The reason I chose this phone is because I heard the cameras that its sports are pretty amazing.   Of course, an SLR camera can be lugged around, and if you have several thousand dollars, you can buy a wide angle lens, regular zoom and telephoto lenses. 

It is capable of wide-angle shots to capture a nice landscape scene, a regular zoom with an ultra fast F1.8 aperture to have nice bokeh behind the subjects you are photographing, and a periscope style 30x optical zoom with up to a 100x "superzoom" for still photos.  In video, I think you are limited to 20 or 30x zooming. 

So after Church on Sunday morning , I pointed my cell phone up at the top of the bridge to see how good the zoom was,,, and I noticed a peregrine falcon sitting up there. I was about 400m from the bridge, plus the height of the towers might be 100m up --- so this raptor might have been 0.5km from me! 

This video shows the wide angle to 30x zoom.  It does not go higher than 30x for video.

See another demo here ... (cant embed!)

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OTxKF1v75Pc

This cell phone also has some pretty amazing technology --- which includes astrophotography. Incredibly, it can do long exposure sky scenes without the use of a mechanical skytracker. It uses software to to counter act the star trailing effect from the rotation of the earth. So, you could take a 10 minute exposure of the milky way, with out any blur effect ... I can't wait to try this out!

So, can a cell phone replace a heavy DSLR camera with 20lbs worth of lenses?  Time will tell but I must say that its impressed me and my son so far just for its quality of photography and videography.

One last closing thought - I had an American Woodcock Peenting and Timberdoodling in South Cameron Woodlot --- My first of year on Feb 19th 2023 at about 6:45pm. This might be the earliest that I have seen one!

Good Birding

Peregrine Falcons in West Windsor

Earlier today, I was reading the Windsor Star, and came across an article about fledgling Peregrine Falcons on the Ambassador Bridge... at the exact same spot they were last year. So, I figured I would check it out. The article by the way is here:  (http://www.windsorstar.com/technology/Falcon+fledglings+flying+coop/3168085/story.html)

I must say, this is an easy bird to see. There is a volunteer group of birders that will show you where they are. The group calls themselves peregrine falcon-watch. Pretty cool. I did not see them there last year. They will even inform you on when they are sleepy and when they start to fly around more. 5pm is a good time to go and see them, they were even pretty active at 8pm. I was there at 3pm and they were all sleeping on ledges that obscured their view. It seems they only posted this article after the baby falcons successfully fledged.

There are 5 Peregrine Falcons to look at, but you might only see 1-3 at a time. The two parents are obviously more mature and have yellow eye rings and beaks. The male (father is the first photo... in honour of father's day) is smaller and the female is larger which is common in raptor sexual dimorphism. The three babies all have blue-ish beaks and eyerings.


*This bird is one of nature's swiftest flyers and can attain dive speeds of 380 km/h (236 MPH).

*Peregrine Falcons range in size from 36 to 49 cm (14 to 19 in.), and females are generally about a third larger than males.

I took my wife and new son to look at the falcons after dinner tonight at 8pm-ish, and it was pretty cool. Two of the babies were flying around the bridge, and being very playful. At one time, I watched them wrestle in the air and interlock talons as I've seen Bald Eagles do.

Overall, a very cool raptor, very easily seen in West Windsor. I might go back over the next few days and see if I can get better shots. I wonder if these guys are going to discover Point Pelee in the fall and chase around some of the migrant birds? That's how nature goes.

Good birding! (And Butterflying!)
-Dwayne

*http://nature.ca/notebooks/english/pfalcon.htm