I was one of the leaders on the King Ranch field trip at the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival yesterday, and the special target species was Feruginous Pygmy Owl. One of the smaller owls, this bird is only 4 inches tall. It has a long tail, which, with its overall brownish tones, makes it, in motion, look like a  Long-billed Thrasher, with which it shares habitat. They are hard to see. Fortunately they respond well to taped calls. Even when close, though, they are remarkably hard to locate. This one responded to the play-back call, but it was close to 20 minutes before one of the sharp-eyed field-trip participants was able to pick it out on its perch…even though it was pretty much in plain sight the whole time. We got it in 7 or 8 spotting scopes for satisfying views, even though it was pretty deep in the trees, without clear lines of sight.

This image is “phonescoped” through a 65mm ZEISS DiaScope at 45x. I have an adapter that holds my Samsung Galaxy S4 where my eye would go behind the eyepiece of the spotting scope, allowing me to capture an image of exactly what my eye would see. You can do the same with many digital cameras, but none are as compact or handy as your smartphone. As you can see, the quality is reasonable.

I then transfered the images to my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 via Bluetooth transfer for processing in Snapseed and Photo Editor. It was necessary to use a Saturation brush in Photo Editor to brush out some color fringing caused by the strong back light. All in all I am quite satisfied with the image.