… has too many hobbies.

Topic:

Birding

14 posts
Jan 2023 – Feb 2026

Bird Photography

Recent Birb Friends

Birding Blog Posts

Birds of Sanibel Island

My partner and I recently returned from a trip to Sanibel Island, Florida — a welcome break from winter in Michigan. We saw a bunch of new-to-us birds, as well as some familiar birds that migrate away from Michigan for the winter. This gallery shows some of the better photos I …

A pipeline for getting bird videos from an IP webcam

I have an IP webcam pointed at my bird bath. (The exact camera is this one from SV3C, which has a 15x optical zoom. It's one of the most economical choices with nontrivial optical zoom that I could find.) The camera supports storing motion clips on an onboard …

#latergram: Wild Birds at the Detroit Zoo, April 2024

The Detroit Zoo features a wild colony of Black-Crowned Night Herons, and this gallery features a number of photos of them — the first time I've ever seen one on the wild! …

#latergram: Bird Photos from Kensington Metropark, July 2025

ℹ️ This post doubles as a testing ground for a new feature I'm developing for the open-source Lychee photo gallery software. …

How I share Bird Buddy photos online

I've developed a simple and fast workflow, along with several purpose-built pieces of software, for sharing Bird Buddy photos online here. I had several goals for this process: 1. Photos should be shared to a Lychee photo album on my picture-sharing subdomain 2. Uploading the photos should be …

Recommendation: Microphone Setup for BirdNET-Pi

I run BirdNET-Pi at home and am excited to share that I have (finally) found a quality, ~$100, microphone setup for it! Listen to this recording: plenty of detail and clarity, and very little noise: American Crow 92 2025 07 31 birdnet 10 22 510:00/6.0241× This recording …

Someone please Photoshop a “Phantom of the Opera” mask onto this grackle for me

Know Your Birds: Red-Headed Woodpecker

The Red-Headed Woodpecker is, at least here in Michigan, a commonly misidentified bird.

My eBird Profile

I have finally learned how to use eBird properly and started using it more seriously!

↗ eBird: Chris Dzombak

Birds in Moab and Arches & Canyonlands National Parks

My partner Thu and I recently spent about a week in Moab, Utah and the national and state parks that surround it. This is a (probably incomplete) list of birds we identified during the trip.

My (Only) Two Complaints about the Canon 10x42 L IS WP Binoculars

I have previously written a glowing review of Canon's 10x42 L IS WP binoculars. And I stand by it! After using them heavily for a while now, though, I have two minor complaints. Stabilization LED Color When image stabilization is on, a green LED lights up on top …

Letter of Recommendation: Quality Binoculars

Over the past year I have tested a bunch of different binoculars; in this post I share recommendations for *good* binoculars at three different price points.

Some recent bird photos

Photo sequence of Bald Eagles hunting, from Nov. 2022

In November of last year, I was lucky to observe a lot of bald eagle activity around a lake near my home. (In total I observed 5 eagles: 3 adults and 2 juveniles.) Content warning: this post includes photos, from a distance, of a dead bird. One Saturday morning, I …