While in San Diego for the San Diego Birding Festival, I spent a morning at Cabrillo National Monument testing a new digiscoping adapter on my ZEISS DiaScope. While there, the soaring Pelicans above the Tide Pools area tempted me to practice my flight shots. Flight is the final frontier of digiscoping…the greatest challenge. Granted, Pelicans are kind of cheating…they soar on outstretched wings in relatively predictable patterns, moving at a reasonable speed, and they are big! I did say this was a practice exercise. For practice to be effective, you have to have some acceptable percentage of success. Sharp-shinned Hawks are not practice birds. Goldfinches are not practice birds. Pelicans are practice birds.

I set up where there was a steady stream of passing Pelicans, coming by in groups of 10-15, curling up over a high point of land on the cliff and sailing out over a little bay. I prefocused on a convenient sign on the cliff edge at about frame filling distance for a Pelican. I could pick the birds up a thousand yards down the coast as they began to rise, and track them into my focus zone. With the zoom on the scope at full wide and the camera zoom set to just eliminate vignetting, the auto focus on the camera was effective for about 3 or 4 seconds as the birds passed. In that time they went from 6 or 7 birds in the frame, as in the second and third shots, to a single bird filling the full width, as in the first shot. Of course I was using the the 4 frames per second continuous shot mode on the little Canon SD4000IS, so each of these shots is culled from a burst of several shots taken as I panned with the birds. I could just barely follow them long enough for a single burst before they were too close and then past me. I had to be thankful that the steam was steady. I never had to wait more than a few moments for the next group to appear over my headland. They were still going by when I decided I had enough on my SD card to sort through when I got back to the hotel.

Depending on the height of the birds they were framed against the blue of the sea or the somewhat gray sky. You can actually see the transition in shot #3.

All shots with the Canon SD4000IS behind the 15-56x Vario Eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL. Somewhere in the 1200mm equivalent field of view range. Kids and Pets mode. Shots 1) and 5) at ISO 160 @ 1/2000th second, the rest at ISO 125 @ 1/1600th sec.

Processed for clarity and sharpness in Lighroom.