This is the second year I have seen cliff swallows but if I see them in one place for more than two days in a row...well, I guess I never have. It seems to me to be just incredible good luck with timing that I see them at all, when I have my camera. Please excuse the inexact birding teminology but my obsevation both years is the same. A mud puddle occurs after a rain. The birds circle and swarm and dive over the puddle extremely fast for what feels like a long time. When they finally decide to land in the mud around the puddle, one comes down first and then in a second or two, there are more than you can count all clustered in the same spot. (They make me think of bats.) When one takes off, they all follow en masse. The following day, it's very likely the mud puddle has dried up and no more cliff swallows. This week I got some photos of them around a mud puddle left by tire tracks in the dirt (near a lake) that filled with water when it was raining. The next day, the water in the tire track had evaporated and the cliff swallows were gone.
My question is, if you've photographed these birds, how do you do it? I took at least 100 photos of them on that one very sunny morning and was only satisfied with 5 shots (that I know could have been better). I'm thinking their uniqueness is that there is so many of them fidgeting around in one spot at once but that's also the problem for me. I honestly have no idea how to capture them. They're all on the ground, looking different ways, they're extremely fidgety, there's so many of them. I wound up cropping some out of the photos I kept so the photos didn't look like one big disorganized mess but I could use some ideas. Thanks.
