Page 23 - Backyard Bird Photography: How to Attract Birds to Your Home and Create Beautiful Photographs

Scrub Jay with donut hole

I don’t recommend feeding human food to birds, but I do it on rare occasions for the
experiment and to get a neat shot. By the way, the California Towhee and California
Thrasher, in addition to the Scrub Jay, love Cheerios.

In the past, I hung my hummingbird and oriole feeders from a stationary pole that I
pressed into the soil, but in recent years, I have also been using a pole mounted on a

circular base so I can move the pole around to different areas, depending on which
backgrounds I want to use. I attach a long arm to the pole and then hang the feeder from
this arm, so that the feeder is far enough away from the pole that the pole won’t get in the
shot. (In the case of the oriole feeder, I sometimes attach a second arm so that the oriole
can perch on this arm just before dropping down to the oriole feeder, but it isn’t really
necessary. The oriole is happy to perch on the main arm before approaching the feeder.)

Hooded Oriole on pole

In addition, I can attach these arms as high or low on the pole as I want, so I can control
not just whether I have a yellow background from the bush daisy flowers, but what the
composition of this background will be. I have to experiment with a few placements of the
arm until the right combination of yellow flowers and green leaves give me a pattern that I