Toronto photographer Jamie Hedworth sent us this great shot of a Blue Jay bird in Toronto.

With the Blue Jays heading into Game 4 today at the Rogers Centre, let us all hope that this is a sign of good things to come for the team and the city.

To see more photos from around Toronto by Jamie Hedworth, please visit his Flickr Page – https://www.flickr.com/photos/39172655@N07/

To submit photos to be featured on our website, please visit our Flickr Group Pool.

The post Blue Jay by Photographer Jamie Hedworth appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

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.

The post 2014 Toronto Bird Photo Booth Competition Winners Announced appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

Toronto Bird Photo Booth went to the beach this week! The cameras were set up at various points along the shoreline where it became a feeder for shore birds trading meals for extreme close-ups and emotion filled portraits. You can read up on how Week Seven was hosted by DryShield Basement Waterproofing Crack Master Gary Dorner in what’s becoming a pretty fascinating competition story thus far. Gary definitely added to the mix doing a fantastic job directing the cameras, adopting a totally unique photo strategy for sensational results.

Gary Dorner is an adventurous boater who just got his Captain’s license this summer. As a veteran photographer, and gadget lover he embraced the Toronto Bird Photo Booth immediately, and formed an action plan to get the best shots just as quickly. He emailed me to invite me down to the water’s edge where he decided to set up the rigs some distance from shore on a concrete peninsula orbited by a few different types of remarkably tame waterfowl.

Gary did lots of things differently; he adopted a unique bird feed strategy which was to crumble an entire loaf of brown Wonder-bread, one slice at a time, directly in front of the cameras which are otherwise focused on the city in the background. So while other participants took a week or longer to get birds to come to the lens, Gary’s entire shoot lasted less than ten minutes. Two Canada Geese came over as soon as they say the bread bag, and the rest of the ducks followed the source of the squealing seagulls who ate as much as they could before those two big bully geese arrived. Scrambling about getting the odd piece of bread thrown directly in front of them were the American black ducks that Gary likes so much.

Gary’s shoot produced some remarkable pictures; his gallery will prove to be a strong contender in the 2014 Toronto Bird Photo Booth Business Challenge. It really is remarkable how he had the vision to take the cameras off the tripods and set them falt on the ground. with an eye on getting closer to the birds by getting right down on the muddy pavement to look into their eyes for a sense of their emotions. He knew he was going to feed brown wonder bread and he knew the birds would be going to ground to get it , so it made sense to him to put the cameras right on the muddy concrete and shoot this action. It worked. And although he tried to favour the ducks, the seagulls and especially the juvenile gulls got most of the bread.

The long and cumbersome wings of these gulls may not help them get into the air very quickly, or easily, but they’re also perfectly designed for soaring long distances with little effort, and for swooping in and snatching bread balls away from slower ducks. The ducks have shorter rounded elliptical wings that can get them off the ground in a heartbeat, but the energy that it takes to lift that heavy body is harder to sustain. Gulls are members of the Laridae family, which are all long winged seabirds, with stout bills, webbed feet and generally rounded tails; most species are coloured white below with pale grey to black back and wings, some with a dark hood when breeding.

Seagulls are very cosmopolitan birds and are found in every city in the world. Mainly coastal dwellers, there are also inland varieties that live near water. There are 7 genera, 51 species, 78 taxa with 6 species considered threatened, but no species of gull has gone extinct since the late 1600s, when such recording began. This is a creature that can live and even thrive in the most densely populated areas of our society. Nearly one-quarter of the present population of Canada lives in southern Ontario near Lake Ontario

The city’s waterfront is filled with all manner of avian and marine wildlife that is threatened by urban development, including expansion of the Port Lands, and the potential expansion of the Toronto Island Airport . Green spaces from the Rouge Park to the Leslie Street Spit and Colonel Sam Smith Park are home to precious avian wildlife, including 100,000 cormorants alone. By shutting down the worst industrial polluters in the 1970s and 80s, the City of Toronto has vastly improved air quality over the past decades. Gradually progress is being made to rein in toxic exhausts and large scale carbon emissions. One of the highlights of the Toronto lakeshore today the many species of wild ducks, particularly the American Black Ducks that are quite sensitive to low level toxins.

American Black Ducks are a threatened species

American Black Duck (Anus rubrites) is a dabbling duck, which means it is a surface feeder and only makes shallow dives. The species does well living beside man in shallow wetlands across eastern North America.

Females select a nest site that is located in wooded, bushy or grassy areas under overhanging vegetation that protects and conceals the nest. It is common to see the female leading her young in the spring and early summer. Females lay an average of nine greenish buff or creamy white eggs, which they incubate for about 26 days. The female stays with her ducklings for seven to eight weeks until they are able to fly, then retires to a secluded area to moult. Males typically abandon females during mid-incubation and move to larger lakes and wetlands to moult their feathers.

The American Black Ducks don’t attract a lot of attention; they flock with the ubiquitous Mallards, where they look quite similar to the female Mallards. But take a second look next time you spot a group brown ducks, and you may notice the dark chocolate-brown flanks, pale grayish face, and olive-yellow bill of an American Black Duck living in their midst.

The post Bird Photo Booth Business Challenge – DryShield appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

This week, Toronto Bird Photo Booth flew across town to land on the pea gravel roof of a two story building on the north side of Queen St W between Niagara and Bellwoods. Dan Sheridan CEO of TOUGHROOF used the space to shoot a fantastic gallery of images; he chose as background the view looking north over the rear alley. You can read up on how he ended up here, and see more pictures in Commercial Roofer Hosts Week Six bird photo booth story update on the Birds of Toronto website. “These are the birds of Queen St West,” Dan proclaimed with pride, “they will certainly have more character than the other neighbourhood birds!”

Dan Sheridan is an expert commercial industrial roofer who specializes in resurfacing shopping malls and apartment building rooftops. TOUGHROOF is seamless roof exterior which means there’s no place for Mother Nature’s extreme weather, bugs, animals and birds to enter. When Dan sees birds roosting on a client’s roof he gets worried. Birds on the roof means problems which could be as minor as heat loss, or be a sign of more serious issues like ponding water or perforations that have become habitations for cavity dwelling birds.

Dan’s keen eye catches even the most minor design issues like water pipes that have been run too close to the edge of the roof that will invariably become roosting rails for pigeons and starlings whose droppings are so acidic they breakdown many roofing substrates, especially tar-based materials. Droppings which are allowed to accumulate on flat roofs will almost certainly destroy the surface filament, break the seal, and cause the roof to leak. All flat roofs should be inspected semi-annually and after major storms. During the walk around, the property manager should pay particular attention to the flashings and inspect sharp bends and places that can open up or may need to be sealed with plastic cement, mesh and spikes.

Dan brought a very small bag of birdseed that appears to be the same sunflower seed and corn mix used by many of the other competitors but the label said ‘for canaries and finches’ and by that I think they meant for small birds. And that’s just what Dan got, the most charismatic small birds yet recorded in the competition and quite representative of Queen St – its clear these birds came to the silver bowl to party.

House sparrows are the punks of the bird world.

Unlike the graceful birds of prey that eat what they kill, house sparrows will destroy other birds’ eggs and young just for the fun of it! They are psychopathic and always have been. This bird was among the first animals in the world to be given a proper latin name by Carl Linnaeus, who classified them Passer domesticus in the 1758 10th edition of Systema Naturae. Other early authors described this birds’ caustic personality, and penchant for causing trouble.

For whatever reason, 100 years later this bird species was deliberately imported to North America. City officials introduced House sparrows in Brooklyn, NY in 1851 for the benefit of the city. A second group was imported in 1852, and subsequent introductions occurred in New England and in San Francisco, CA and today of course its the most popular bird on the continent.

House sparrows can easily produce three to five broods per season. As if that is not enough, male sparrows will mate with several females. With three to five eggs in the average clutch, a single pair of house sparrows can quickly become a flock of fifteen to twenty birds in one season, at a single nesting site. Consequently, house sparrow can now be found in all cities, suburbs, and farms and anywhere there are houses, throughout the entire continent.

House sparrow is actually not a sparrow at all, but rather its a weaver finch, a sub-species of the Finch family. Their plumage is mostly different shades of grey and brown. The sexes exhibit strong dimorphism – both sexes can be seen sharing the bowl in Dan’s photos, and yet the male and female look nothing alike. The female is mostly beige brown above and below, while the male has boldly coloured head markings, a reddish back, and grey underparts.

The male house sparrow is easily identified by its black throat and chest, which makes him appear as if he is wearing a bib. The female is much harder to discern and is often confused with Song Sparrows and Field Sparrows, to name only a few. Identifying sparrows is tricky. You can see all Dan’s photos in the Birds of Toronto photo gallery, and I think you’ll agree his pictures are among the best recorded thus far.

Good work Dan Sheridan.

The post Bird Photo Booth Business Challenge – TOUGHROOF appeared first on Toronto Guardian.

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.

The post Bird Photo Booth Business Challenge – Archer Dental appeared first on Toronto Guardian.