Mom & dad bird (eastern Phoebe) fight over who gets to feed baby - baby gets ass kicked...
- Thread starter erkme73
- Start date
Fastb
Known around here
Mom: Don't feed my babies any spiders!
Oceanslider
Known around here
wow, they are smashing up the spider in the little chicks mouth. Great video. What setup are you using there to get this video.
The bird on the left is the mom - unless daddy birds also sit on the eggs. I'm using an old Hikvision DS-2CD3332-I eye-ball camera that I had in a junk bin. It's mounted about 6" from the nest. I did open it up and manually adjusted the focal depth to the edge of the nest. Unfortunately, the Phoebe birds like to cram their nests into corners, and this was no exception. With only a few inches between the top of the nest and the floor boards of my porch, I couldn't get the camera high enough to see into it.
I'm using Blue Iris to record.
What's interesting about the bird's behavior is how brutal they were with the chick. They were beating the snot of out it trying to make a point. Even after the dad bird left, the mom still kept wailing away at the baby. It blows my mind how these things know how to breed, build nests, feed/care for their young - all without any previous generation teaching them. Talk about being driven by instinct.
I'm using Blue Iris to record.
What's interesting about the bird's behavior is how brutal they were with the chick. They were beating the snot of out it trying to make a point. Even after the dad bird left, the mom still kept wailing away at the baby. It blows my mind how these things know how to breed, build nests, feed/care for their young - all without any previous generation teaching them. Talk about being driven by instinct.
Funny how blurry the baby birds look at around 1:14. Is that just YouTube's compression or is it that way in the source too?
I can't really tell much of a difference. It appears to be slightly more sharp on the original, but I think there's a lot of motion blur and focal-depth issues. Keep in mind, when I turned the fixed board lens on the camera, I was shooting for the outside edge of the nest. Just a few inches further and the focus is lost (see the screw heads on the deck beams).
