Here's another shot of the rarely seen Black-billed Cuckoo on West Rock mountain. This milk chocolate colored bird popped up from the back side of the rocky ridge onto an eye-level tree branch just 45 feet in front of me surprising both of us. I wasn't even sure what it was until afterwards, but raced to grab some kind of image before the bird realized that he had landed practically in my lap. They're not the sharpest shots, but not bad given the field conditions and timing. For all you camera buffs out there, here's are the stats:
Canon EF 100/400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM Telephoto Zoom Lens on Canon 7D Mark II crop body, which captures 10 fps (frames per second). Thankfully so- I was able to grab 10 images between 2:36pm and 2:37pm, in the one second before the bird flew off. The dark bird was back-lit against the harsh afternoon sky. I shifted a few inches to position a darker tree trunk behind the bird so that the CMOS Sensor wouldn't blow out the reading, cranked the ISO, pushed the shutter speed to 1/2000 of a second, opened the aperture wide up, lowered the flash -2, nudged the AWB +1/3 stop and hit the button hard. - Lesley Roy