Nest Building American Redstart
One of the great pleasures when spending time birding in nature, is watching birds build their nests. It’s purely amazing to watch how they braid piece by piece materials they meticulously collect in nature. American Redstarts tend to build nests at eye level, making it easy for humans to observe. The process is however long and tedious.
This American Redstart female at times took as long as 40 minutes between trips and has been building her nest for several days. You have to be patient and keep a respectful distance from the nest as your presence may intimidate her from coming back. Use a long focal length lens to photograph or binoculars to observe from a distance
You won’t always have a clear view. Birds choose their nesting locations carefully. Removing branches to favor your photography is just unacceptable and selfish. This only makes the nest more vulnerable to predators and will add an additional stress to the bird as she nests.
A low cost solution that seems to work well with video to double your focal length on a DSLR is the Kenko Teleplus PRO 300 DGX 2x AF Teleconverter. You will have to add back a little contrast but it works relatively well with most lenses. I don’t suggest it for photography. It tends to make focus slow and the image quality does not match up to Nikon or Canon’s teleconverters.