Laura Erickson's For the Birds

At the moment I started writing this, on April 15, it was snowing, though nothing accumulated. As long as it stays above 20º or so outside, our heat pump provides all our heating, but we don’t like the idea of squandering electricity or gas, so we’re keeping our windows tightly closed.

But at 8:43 am Saturday, April 12, while I was working at my computer, I suddenly heard Sandhill Cranes flying over. They must have been close because the sound came through the closed window while the noisy heat pump was working. I looked out but couldn’t see them, and I didn’t want to report them to eBird without confirmation—my hearing is bad enough even without a closed window and a noisy heat pump between me and a bird. So I grabbed my cellphone and turned on my “Terra Listens” app. I have a bioaccoustic monitor—what’s called a “Terra Station”—set up outside my office window which is always listening to the birds in my yard, listing them on my phone app in real time. Sure enough, the exact same minute that I heard those cranes, Terra had heard them, too.

If I’m paying attention to the Terra feed when it reports a bird I can’t hear anymore, such as a Brown Creeper or Golden-crowned Kinglet, I look out the window or charge outside with my binoculars to confirm. Terra’s identifications are hardly perfect: one night a few months ago, it reported a Barn Owl when chances of one just randomly flying over Peabody Street, much less calling out within hearing range of my house, is vanishingly small—the species is considered “accidental” for the entire state, and there have been only three reports EVER of Barn Owls in my very large county.

A few times, Terra has reported a Pileated Woodpecker calling in the middle of the night, which again is extremely improbable. And on the very screen reporting my Sandhill Cranes, it shows a Chipping Sparrow from April 11. This would be exceptionally early for them and I saw that report as it happened, so I went out to verify but there were only juncos, whose song can be mistaken for a chippie by even fairly experienced birders. But I learned long ago never to make the perfect the enemy of the good. The cut-off between an A and a B when I was in school was 93 percent, and Terra easily meets that standard.

Hearing birds through a closed window is tricky, but looking at them is another matter—I keep binoculars close to all our good windows. Except for the limited field of view from any window, identifying birds with binoculars is usually as easy with as without window glass. But with a camera? I used to think photographing a bird through a closed window would never give me acceptable photos except for documentation. Most of the photos I managed to get of a Rufous Hummingbird visiting in November and early December 2004 were through the closed window, and they were nothing to write home about.

Worse, the Minnesota Ornithologists’ Union wouldn’t accept anyone’s photos as documentation of that bird down to species—digital cameras were just not clear enough. So the official records call my little hummer Selasphorus sp. But that was more about cameras than the window.

That same year a Pileated Woodpecker frequented a window suet feeder. He was a messy eater and gooped up the window, but I still like my photos just because. During a blizzard, I opened the window for a while, hoping the hummingbird could feed inside, and the Pileated showed up and let me take his photo without any glass blocking the way. That was thrilling.

The very best photo I ever took through window glass was also of a Pileated. We’d just had a new window installed in our dining room—the men were hardly out the door—and I grabbed my camera to photograph the first bird to show up just to see how it turned out through a spanking new window. And instantly in flew a male Pileated. I held down the shutter in “burst mode,” and WHOA! I got a magazine-quality image of his tongue fully extended!

This week a male and female cardinal turned up in my backyard next to the window where I keep the camera I mostly just use for backyard photography. It has an 800-mm lens, so I use it with a tripod, which is why I don’t normally lug it around when I’m birding. And the longer the lens, the trickier the shots are through glass, so I usually open that window when I’m going to sit there for a while. But unlatching and opening the window always scares birds off so I took my cardinal photos through the glass.

I haven’t cleaned the windows yet this spring, and I was shooting at an angle (you’re shooting through the least amount of glass, so get the least distortion, when the camera is perpendicular and very close to the window), but they turned out fairly decently. I edit and organize my photos using Adobe Lightroom, and one thing I figured out a few years ago when I have a window shot is to use a process called “Dehaze” to make it look more natural. My shots of the male cardinal weren’t bad even without that, but the photos of the female definitely look better after processing.

I’m pretty sure the New Testament Paul was not thinking about windows when he wrote in I Corinthians, “For now we see through a glass, darkly.” Historians believe windows were invented in ancient Rome, but not till about 100 AD; Paul died about 35 years earlier. But window glass can darken our photos in addition to killing a billion or so birds here in America every day, darkening the world for all of us. Photos of living birds through glass, with practice and sometimes a little processing, can at least lighten our hearts.