The Toronto Bird Photo Booth itself is an adaptation of Bryson Lovette’s famed contraption, a handsome rosewood bird feeder box with a Styrofoam block insert cut to accommodate an iPhone 5c with the HD Camera motion detector app correctly installed. Secured by rubber bands, the phone is positioned inside a Styofoam cradle inside the feeder with the camera lens facing the silver dish. The signature silver dish was in the foreground of every picture taken by the phone cam, except for the images of waterbirds in the last chapter; when Gary Dorner removed the armature and dish to set the feeder down, right on the ground. Another wildlife camera, a Wingscapes BirdCam Pro was set up on another tripod facing this rig with the same silver feeder dish in the center of the frame. The challenge asked local business owners to set up the devices on their business property to photograph their birds and win prizes and acclaim.

The camera systems were developed by Rob Campbell and David Suddaby of SMOJoe, and Vigorate Digital Solutions loyalty programs donated the website. You can read the very first chapter explaining the birth of the Bird Photo Booth Business Challenge on Toronto Guardian magazine.

Episode One
Paul Peic hosted the Bird Photo Booth at his float home in the Scarborough Bluffs. He got the first ground-breaking shots of a Red Wing Black bird and a Common Grackle visiting the silver bowl. Paul was considered to be a pioneer of the system in the way he positioned the device to get great backdrops and its from his pictures we leaned to always use a white cover to reduce back lighting and thereby get better shots of each bird’s face. Toronto Guardian detailed Paul and his business and showed his best shots in June 2014 as the contest launched.

Episode Two
Vigorate Digital Solution in Toronto hosted week two on a rooftop in Yorkville and after a long and lonely week beside an active construction site, there finally appeared one tiny sparrow in the Wingscapes camera only. The sad account appeared in Toronto Guardian account of Week Two. This was the most downtown shoot of the entire collection and the least attended by birds. This is where the shiny glass towers that dominate the skyline kill birds dead everyday.

Episode Three
John Conn of Standard Telecom business phone systems hosted the bird photo booth in Leslieville behind his corporate headquarters on Laird Dr. John is a man with a vision for birds, and he created a feast for his feathered friends on a picnic table out back, and then set up the cameras to shoot the scene. It worked out great, and he got lots of terrific shots. Some pictures show two or three different species of birds eating together peacefully. You can read all the detail and see pictures of the set up and the birds he got on Toronto Guardian Bird Photo Booth Business Challenge Week Three at Standard Telecom update that was published on 2nd day of July 2014.

John’s best picture and indeed the winner for the Best Portrait category was his ‘Curious Grackle’.

Episode Four
David Shephard of Jib Strategic Agency in Toronto took the Bird Photo Booth north to a farm in the Rouge Valley near the Toronto Zoo where he was and probably still is building a tiny house in connection with Green Moxie magazine. But sadly, David’s week long tenure was drenched in rain, and he was lucky to get a couple shots of a Mourning Dove out roaming for seeds and worms on a dry summer morning. You can read the whole account on Toronto Guardian Week Four update. Its called a mourning dove because they mate for life, but we discovered in one frame taken with the Wingscapes BirdPro camera that it still has its mate, and so technically its not in mourning yet!

This picture was selected to win acclaim as the Rarest Species snapped by the cameras this summer – Congratulations David Shephard.

Episode Five
Dr Natalie Archer of Archer Dental in Toronto took the booth to her friend’s lush backyard less than two blocks away from her Sherbourne and Bloor St dental office location. She hoped to get some close-up pictures of a wide variety of birds that are frequent diners at the existing feeder, but instead only one ‘bully bird’ filled every frame. Toronto Guradian published this story of a real live Blue Jay who gave a great performance in Week Five. Dr Archer snapped terrific shots of the big blue bully landing and taking off as he ate up all the birdseed in the silver bowl and kept everyone else away.

Episode Six
Dan Sheridan, Principal at TOUGHROOF took the Bird Photo Booth to 700 Queen St West and set it up on a freshly graveled flat roof overlooking the residential alleys behind the building (facing north); his birdseed offering was soon harvested by a flock of rambunctious Queen St sparrows. Toronto Guardian update chronicled the cavorting House Sparrows in Week Six and published pictures of their violent interactions at the silver bowl.

This photo is the winner of the Group Shot because even though it doesn’t have the most birds in the frame – that was a picture by John Conn – it does have three active and emotional creatures attempting to share the bowl.

Episode Seven
Last but not least, in mid September came along a true innovator named Gary Dorner who has a boat on the Toronto Lakeshore and is foreman at Dryshield basement waterproofing. Gary has a passion bordering on obsession for ducks, but he appreciates waterfowl of all types, except seagulls. As a boat owner he listed several reasons why he loathes seagulls.

Gary customized the booths even more than others by removing them from their tripods and taking the silver bowl off the feeder box. He set the motion controlled photography instruments right down on the muddy cement, and with everything turned on he fed the ducks from a loaf of brown Wonder bread. But of course the seagulls came thick and fast and in much greater numbers than the ducks, and Gary was soon swinging the half empty bread bag over the cameras to keep the seagulls at bay so the ducks could feed in front of the rolling cameras. It didn’t work, but Gary won anyway. Ironically Gary won the Grand Prize for this shot called ‘A Cheeky Gull’, a juvenile seagull stealing away his bread and backing up quickly to make a quick get away! The account is described in much greater detail in Toronto Guardian story about Basement Waterproofing business hosting Week Seven, published in Sept 2014.

Congratulations Gary Dorner for winning the Grand Prize picture with this shot of a cheeky seagull stealing bread! It wasn’t what he intended but a happy accident. There is no prize except honour and critical acclaim for his imaginative approach.

After seven exciting deployments, the Toronto Bird Photo Booth camera captured images of over twenty different types of local birds and hopefully went some distance to remind Torontonians that wild birds exist in the city to eat bugs and add songs to our urban environment. You can read all about all the deployments and savour the whole Story of the 2014 Toronto Bird Photo Booth Business Challenge on the Birds of Toronto website.

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The Toronto Bird Photo Booth flew back downtown last week, right into the heart of the city where it was hosted by Dr Natalie Archer of Archer Dental who hoped to use the automated motion detector equiped wildlife cameras to get good close-up shots of the birds she only sees at a distance nesting in the trees below her eighth story downtown dental clinic windows. Archer Dental is located at 600 Sherbourne St, right across from the subway station on the top floor of the Rosedale Medical Centre. You can see the CN Tower outside her west windows. But sadly the business had no place to set up the bird photo booth outside their premises, as they have no balcony. We tried the rig up on the roof, but that didn’t work out at all. You can read all the gory details on the blog in Toronto Dentist Dr Natalie Archer Hosts Week Five update.

Dr Natalie Archer is a very personable dentist who embraces all manner of new ideas and dental equipment innovations. Her office is filled with state of the art tools, designer dental chairs, blue bubble walls, and a triptych digital art piece in the waiting room that she licensed from a local Toronto artist. The company blog profiles scientific breakthroughs and gadgets like smart toothbrushes. So it stands to reason that using new technology to explore nature is exactly the kind of thing she’s all about doing, and although she has never been that much of a birdwatcher, she quickly embraced this avian species saving idea.

After some doing Dr Archer asked her neighbor a few streets south and west, and one who happens to have a very bird friendly property with an active year round feeder, to host the booth on her behalf. Together they managed to lens a terrifically charismatic bluejay. This territorial bird is a frequent visitor to her friend’s feeder and that’s the kind of situation where the bird photo booth does best.

Dr. Archer used her friend’s own mixed birdseed blend (corn and sunflower seed) in hopes of bringing the same specimens to our bird photo booth as which normally dine in her feeder. It worked. After just two days in this location the Wingscapes BirdPro trail cam snapped this gorgeous bluejay.

There were shots on the iPhone camera which show the bird chased away a chipmunk in order to have the bowl all to herself. The blue jay can be beneficial to other bird species, as it may chase predatory birds away too. It will stand up to birds such as hawks and owls, and it will scream if it sees a predator within its territory. The blue jay has also been known to sound an alarm call when hawks or other dangers appear and smaller birds will recognize this call and head for the trees. In more than one fascinating study however researchers have proven that the crafty Bluejay can and will occasionally falsely impersonate the calls of raptors, especially those of the red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks, possibly to test if such a hawk is in the vicinity? or possibly to scare off other birds that may compete for food sources. Next generation Bird Photo Booth will have an audio recorder.

The blue jay mainly feeds on nuts and seeds such as acorns, soft fruits, arthropods, and occasionally small vertebrates. It ‘gleans’ food from trees, shrubs, and the ground. Its a very gentle bird but will become agressive and threatening with humans who come to close to its nest.

It’s interesting to note that in the photo above there’s no pronounced crest on the bluejay’s head, which is a crown of feathers that may be raised or lowered according to the bird’s mood. When excited or aggressive, the crest will be fully raised. When frightened, the crest bristles outwards, brush like. In this photo here I would say the bird is completely at ease, feeding peacefully, and so its crest is flat to its head. It has no cause for alarm.

You can see all of Dr Archer’s photos in the Birds of Toronto photo gallery on this site.

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Week Three of the Toronto Bird Photo Booth Business Challenge saw the cameras fly north to Leaside and land in the back corner of the rear parking lot at 33 Laird Dr. The weather was brooding and ominous storm clouds threatened to drown myself and the water sensitive equipment. But as I waited, I noticed there were birds everywhere… Like out of a Hitchcock movie the air was thick with them. The nearby ravine and its trees and shrubs and the wetlands by the Don River below are natural habitat to thousands of Toronto birds. I could see and hear them all around this bird friendly area.

John Conn runs office phones, Standard IP Telecom which services older model phone networks, and his firm rents the location here on Laird Dr. In the back corner of their parking lot there is a very bird friendly area, with a fence and two tall trees in which the birds sit and serenade the staff who smoke cigarettes on break at the picnic tables below.

John had carefully thought out his photography strategy, and he knew where and how he wanted to set up the Bird Photo Booth with cameras pointing at a picnic table laid out with bird seed. And John also came prepared with custom bird seed that he picked out himself from a nearby garden supply store on Bayview which contained all manner of sunflower seeds, some shelled, some unshelled, with lots of corn and kibble.

A budding naturalist, John has been working in telecommunications and keeping an eye phone lines and birds for twenty years. And so he jumped at the opportunity to finally meet the ones hanging around outside his office window.

Although John runs his business on an old Blackberry Bold cellphone, he quickly caught onto how to use the iPhone 5C and set up the HD Camera Motion Detector app. He also took it upon himself to hide the unit from the prying eyes of passerbys, and he cut a hole in a greeting card to keep the device hidden from view.

One failure on my part was that I didn’t show John how to adjust the Wingscapes BirdPro camera lens focus ring for the shorter distance he selected, and so I see now that almost all of the images from that camera are not as sharp as the crisp shots I collected during testing. Another failing of mine is the time stamped date mechanism on this rig reverted back to January 1999 despite my efforts to set it right.

John says he didn’t have to wait long before the birds flocked to his offerings. The male Common Grackle is a bold creature. Grackles are blue tinted blackbirds that look like they’ve been slightly stretched. They’re taller and longer tailed than other blackbirds, with a distinctive curved bill you can really see in this picture. This particular specimen has a nice dark blue glossy-iridescent head and shoulders. Grackles walk around lawns and fields on their long legs or gather in great noisy groups high in trees in the autumn. They prefer to gather in evergreen trees which is interesting. They eat many crops , most notably corn, but will eat nearly anything else they can find as well, including food waste on city streets and sidewalks.

Week Three – photos Standard IP Telecom’s gallery is a terrific contribution to the collection; its filled with great shots from both cameras and really raises the bar again on the challenge as a whole. Next week the bird photo booth flies north to Rouge Park in the top right corner of the GTA.

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Before launching this unique competition I had promised to make the Bird Photo Booth available to the primary sponsors first so they could see their neighbourhood birds and be trendsetters. The deal was they could try it first, and get pictures of their birds up close before the rest of the world caught on and wanted to use this thing.

So now in Week Two, the Bird Photo Booth traveled downtown to settle atop Yorkville’s ultra fashionable boutique businesses, and atop the rooftop balcony of some of the most expensive real estate in Canada. It sat up here to pay homage to a primary sponsor, Vigorate Digital Loyalty Programs, the people who helped build the Birds of Toronto contest website that accommodates the 2014 business challenge, an automated ‘selfie’ bird portrait photography contest.

Vigorate Digital is located at 1252 Yonge St on the second floor of a four storey building, and although they have a spacious interior with bright windows (with corporate names and logos stenciled on the glass which makes them quite bird friendly), they don’t have a rooftop patio, or an exterior balcony of any kind, or even any windows that open. So in order to accommodate their contest entry, I had the interesting challenge of finding a neighbouring rooftop balcony location, and did secure a spot just a few streets south and west of their building on Scollard St. Two youthful interns helped me carry everything over and up four flights of stairs at that address. On that fantastic rooftop patio we positioned the cameras in different ways with different backgrounds, and over the course of seven days I learned a lot about shooting birds in this city.

It was Day Five before any birds even noticed the birdseed.

One of the most important lessons that I learned here is that the contest locations should be primed with food prior to the arrival of the photo booth – the avian visitors need to be shown that the booth is not a threat. A silver dish full of free food isn’t something these birds see everyday, and so it takes them by surprise and they need a week to get used to the contraptions; indeed some of the best pictures in the contest so far are of the birds looking puzzled as they get up close to the rig. As humans we wonder what they’re thinking. . .

When I showed up on Day Six, I noticed with delight that half the Sunflower seeds in the feeder bowl were missing, but yet still there were no pictures. Finally, on Day Seven, the last day allowed, there were a few blurry pictures on one of the chips. The Wingscapes BirdPro camera had motion detected and photographed a tiny visitor that day, a brave little Field Sparrow.

Field Sparrows are found everywhere in downtown Toronto. This is a common bird, and very quiet most of the year, but during its spring mating season it comes alive with a big bouncy ballad. The tiny male Field Sparrows have great big voices when they’re out looking for females on spring mornings.

Next week, the Bird Photo booth is off to Standard Telecom, another eager sponsor and challenger.

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Paul lives at the center of a thriving Toronto Float Homes community, located in the beautiful Scarborough Bluffs, at Bluffer’s Park Marina which is at the very south end of Brimley Rd is on-the-water housing area that’s completely unique in Ontario, Canada. Here are twenty four floating homes – two story and three story houses built on blue barrel composed floats and nestled in a protected cove on Lake Ontario. The village is located only 15 minutes away from downtown Toronto. The car and truck noise up on Kingston Rd above, and the sirens and sounds of the city beyond are blocked entirely by the sandy cliffs north of this sheltered bay. The Scarborough Bluffs also protect the wildlife; itís common to see trumpeter swans, beavers, deer, turtles, salmon and even mink in here.

Float homes are unique because they are not house boats but actual houses on the water. They cannot go boating per say, but can be moved from place to place, and once set up in a secure spot they usually feature a swim out back porch.
Paul lives right in the marina close to restuarants and snack bars and boaters clubhouses. There’s a pure white sand beach nearby that is one of the best kept secrtes in Toronto. Look around here and you will see plenty of wildlife. There are many birds around including some endangered species such as cliff swallows, and of course a family of four gorgeous trumpeter swans; the adults are marked with obvious yellow tags to show the world that humans love them and are always watching.

Paul-Peic’s first shot was of this Red Wing Black Bird. This image was taken by the iPhone 5 camera in the Bird Photo Booth unit proper and Paul expected this bird would be the first to visit. Red Wing Blackbirds are among the most abundant birds across North America, and one of the most clever and tenacious animals in the sky. They are a familiar sight around Blufferís Park atop cattails, and on telephone wires. Glossy-black males have scarlet-and-yellow shoulder patches they can puff up or hide low depending on how confident they feel.

Paul’s best shot is this American Crow which is a large bird and we’re happy to see the photo booth held the weight and did not upset or move too much to scare the bird. American crow (Corvus brachyrhynchos) is a large passerine bird species of the family Corvidae, and although common in North America, they are highly susceptible to the West Nile Virus, and as such they’re monitored as a bio-indicator. Fear not, direct transmission of the West Nile Virus from an American Crows to a human patient is not recorded and not considered very likely at this time.

Paul Peic got his ten great shots and so his gallery is complete. Here are the Bird Photo Booth official competition galleries – Paul has a good collection that will be hard to beat. Although Paul has no group shots or images of rare species, he has good curious birds with great facial expressions against a pleasant marina life background scene – well done.

Stay tuned for Week Two. The booth is on the move downtown.

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