[shattered]

I'm a little late to this thread, but those are great pictures. What type of camera are you using. With mine I have to get so close that the subjects fly away!

I'm hoping to attract more birds to the yard this winter. We also need to get a couple houses out, ours had to be taken down since the wood was rotting.

Love birds and we enjoy the cardinals, chickadees, blue jays, robins, waxwings and many others in our yard!

[rustbucket]

Sorry to be so late in replying but I've been out in West Texas for a week with no computer. Taking pictures of birds, naturally.

The camera I used for the hummingbird pictures was a Canon 20D, a digital camera. It allows for 8 meg jpeg pictures, so the amount of detail is great when I crop pictures. I used a Canon 100-300 mm zoom lens at the full 300 mm extension. The 20D multiplies the 300 mm by 1.6, so the lens was actually acting as a 480 mm lens. That is how I was able to get such enlarged pictures of the birds. Like looking at them through a pair of weakish binoculars.

I just got a 100-400 mm Canon image stabilizer zoom lens that I took on my West Texas trip. At maximum extension, the 20D camera converts the lens to 640 mm. I don't have enough experience with the lens to comment about it yet. It is a heavy lens but seems to take good pictures.

Here is a photo taken with the new 100-400 mm lens -- as near as I can figure the bird is an immature red-tailed hawk. Interesting that they can turn their head completely around to look behind themselves.

The original picture background is nowhere near as blocky as this tinypic version. Not blocky at all.