Chincoteague NWR: Brown-headed Nuthatches

Posted by Don Crockett on March 4, 2012

I videotaped some Brown-headed Nuthatches near the parking lot for the Woodland Trail at Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is on the southern end of Assateague Island in Virginia. The video clip below includes two video segments showing a bird exploring a tree trunk and a bird pecking at a branch.

Brown-headed Nuthatches

Video of Brown-headed Nuthatches at Chincoteague NWR

I just recently started videotaping using a good quality shotgun microphone. I originally had the mic mounted on a bracket attached to the camera body but the "dead cat" windscreen acted like a sail and caused visual vibration with even a small amount of wind. To eliminate the vibration I switched to a mount on the tripod head. This eliminated most of the vibration but under quiet conditions I noticed a new problem. If you listen closely to the first segment in the video above you can hear the servo of the lens image stabilizer grinding away. In the second segment I was able to turn off the stabilizer since the nuthatch wasn't moving. But switching off the stabilizer isn't desirable since birds are rarely stationary for very long and following birds without the stabilizer results in video that is unacceptably jerky. To try to eliminate the stabilizer noise I wanted to get the mic as far away from the lens as possible so I attached it to one of the tripod legs using a GorillaPod one of my cousins gave me for Christmas with some added Gorilla Tape to secure it in place. This gets the microphone around 2 feet away from the lens and this seems to have eliminated the stabilizer noise from the audio channel.

Map of Chincoteague NWR with Marker for the Woodland Trail Parking Lot