Jeff Mann

Jeff is an early-30s birder living in San Antonio. He enjoys birding on the weekend and loves to check out new areas in Texas to photograph and record birds. When not obsessing about birds, you can find him cross-stitching, working on tech projects, and playing Nintendo games.
beginner birder

Birding Summary, Featured, Main Feed

Aerial Feeding of The Gulls and other birds spotted around the park

During my morning trip to the nearby Lake Balboa, the sun was shining and the place was alive with birds of all sorts: Red-wing Blackbirds, American Coots, House Finches, Mallards, Sparrows, Grackles, you get the idea.

They are all hungry for food, most find their own breakfast, but some birds are really aggressive and pandering to get handouts from people— those birds are Ring-Billed Gulls.

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beginner birder's gull guide cover

Education, Featured, Guides, Main Feed

The Beginner Birder’s Gull Guide

Gulls can be confusing! Here are a few tricks to help tell some of the more common gulls apart.

This gull guide is for adult birds only. Gulls get even more tricky than depicted here, due to the fact that juvenile gulls are completely different colors, usually brown with a black bill. Juvenile identification will take more practice, but start with learning the differences between adult gulls, then focus on the young ones. These are the four main gulls I’ve seen in Southern California:

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spotted towhee before and after editing

Education, Featured, Guides, Main Feed

Editing Bird Photos: A Beginner’s Guide

You’ve just returned from your first birding trip with a camera full of photos, now you’re ready to go through them all, edit them, and post them for the world to enjoy. Let’s get started! In this guide I’m going to be showing you how to edit bird photos with Adobe Lightroom CS6. This article shows some of the tweaks I make to my photos before posting them online, but won’t go into the technical things that each change does, you’ll see it for yourself as you edit your own photos.

Why Lightroom instead of Photoshop?

There are two main advantages of using Lightroom to edit your photos.

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Featured, Gear Reviews, Main Feed, Reviews

iPhone 7/8/X and Samsung Galaxy Binocular Adapter Case for Digiscoping

With more and more people carrying cameras with them everywhere, ‘digiscoping’ has increased in popularity. Digiscoping is the practice of pointing a phone camera or digital camera through a pair of binoculars or a spotting scope to increase the zoom and take photos of birds that are really far away.

Trying to do this by holding your phone up to a scope or binoculars is very difficult and tedious. It often requires the cooperation of two people: one to hold the camera and position it properly, and the other to find…

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