The Eastern Phoebe is a small, plain-looking bird that is devoid of the spectacular, either in its behavior or mating habits, although the latter has some pique. In retrospect, I admit that for some inexplicable reason it is a species that I’ve desperately wanted to photograph in the days when I first developed an interest for nature photography. That would be around 2012, when I received a 2x TC to front mount on my Canon G9 point-and-shoot camera. That camera model has a sensor about 11x smaller than my current DX DSLR and therefore extensive use of a cropping tool in PS was not an approach that yielded good results. The G9 sensor and built-in lens had a cropping factor of 4.4, with limited cropping potential, so that the 200mm-like output of the lens when translated into 35mm film equivalent offered uninspiring performance. The conversion exercise had little merit in the practical sense. The front-mounted 2x TC has a much larger objective lens than the supplied optics on a G9 and thus there was no loss in speed after the magnification effect. That installation produced a camera that had the 35mm equivalent of a 400mm lens (sans cropping potential) and even that rig was inadequate to capture a definitive Phoebe shot. Moreover, the camera uses live-view focusing, which is slow, inaccurate and drains battery power. Bird photography seemed a hopeless pursuit at the time and a Phoebe picture of merit seemed just out of reach, even though I frequently spotted one in the field. Also, a Phoebe once spotted and sighted on the my G9 screen was so small in the view-finder (even with the 2xTC attached) that the AF didn’t have a clear subject to focus on, center-weighted or otherwise, and the resultant capture was almost always out-of-focus. Despite the blurred outcome I suspected that the Phoebe was laughing and thinking … ‘what a loser’.
Then came an 18-135mm kit lens with a DX sensor, mighty by comparison. My success rate went up but a satisfactory Phoebe capture still eluded me. The best that I could do fell short of my expectations. That now defines me to this day.

By 2014 I acquired a 70-200mm L series lens without stabilization, much less expensive an acquisition than the IS version, or for the truly sublime, the mighty f2.8 flagship version that would have needed 5
th generation stabilization to subdue my shaky excitement, a dyskenesis that would have governed my performance with such a masterpiece of technology. Even now, I get pilo-erection when thinking about it. Steady now, “pilo” refers to hair follicles, you filthy-minded hue-maan.
A Phoebe generally feeds from mid-story to close to the ground and it prefers sites near water, either a pond or a creek will do. My first sightings were in and around Highland Creek in Scarborough. Getting close enough for a detailed photo with a 200mm lens meant staking-out a site and waiting for a close approach with as little re-location as possible.
The plan with the most cognitive strategy invited a Phoebe to a small pond so that I could study from afar where it preferred to hunt and then to relocate myself to that special stage under a cloak of camouflage and then just wait for the spook to fade. The Phoebe would relocate to the other side of the pond, essentially a spot near where I just made my observations. I knew that, in time, it would return to its original location. As it turns out, my closest shot of a Phoebe is not my favourite. The capture of a Phoebe perched in the rain says it all to me … a portrait of a Phoebe on a rainy April morning. What’s not to like?


Sometimes a Phoebe appears where water is not nearby, especially during the fall migration when it will visit a clearing next to a woodlot, like the local incarnation of that setting. A body of water within a km is still a better draw. The Beare wetland is not far away from the street-side woodlot and the Rouge is even closer.