It was a comical scene at the Mercer Meadows Pole Farm: my birding buddies Lee, Jim and I we’re standing in front of a section of trees and bushes, watching a ruby-crowned kinglet flit from branch to branch.
Each of is a well-experienced birder and photographer, and we were all bemoaning how quickly the kinglet — just a few yards in front of us — zipped off each time one of us tried to focus. I don’t think any of us got a single shot of the bird, which we spotted at the old AT&T Building One site.
Park managers put in a metal fence at the spot a year or two ago, the kind with rectangular openings on which birds will sometime perch. More often, the fence wires drive our autofocus cameras bonkers as we try to thread a shot through the openings only a few inches wide and tall.
Lee, Jim and I walked a big loop around the park and encountered another birding friend, Michael, near the same spot where we’d been thwarted by the mercurial kinglet. What did Michael say? How hard it is to focus on kinglets through that darn metal fence.
Exactly.
Maybe that’s when the Birding Gods of Irony decided to have their fun with us. We walked out of the woods and started down the central path toward the parking lot when I spotted a small bird at about eye-level on a small tree.
“What is this little guy?” I asked, bringing up my camera to focus on the bird seemingly entwining itself with one of the branches. The bird was in shadow, and I had time to take a few shots, noting that I’d have to figure out the ID when I brought the images up on screen.
When I did so, my first thought was it was a goldfinch, and I amended my e-Bird report, bringing the day’s species count up to 30.
But something about the eye-ring on the bird made me wonder, and I put the photo into Merlin to check myself. Merlin’s answer: ruby crowned kinglet!
I laughed aloud. This one bird of a species almost always so difficult to capture had stayed on a single branch for at least 30 seconds, allowing me to take several shots.
The bird didn’t show its ruby crown, but that’s not unusual. I’ve luckily gotten other shots showing the ruby crown, and on this day I was plenty pleased to get what I got. 🦅
The Jersey Birder 