Blue winged teal on the wing and a large memory buffer.

Teals are a type of duck, albeit smaller than more familiar species like mallards.  They are social birds and tend to be in groups; undoubtedly they benefit from having multiple eyes on the environment for potential predators.  In North America there are three species of teal which include cinnamon teals, green-winged teals, and blue-winged teals (shown above).  The sky-blue patch of convert feathers and the white stripe on the face are good indicators of the species.  Secondaries are emerald-green in colour.  The brilliant wing hues are not visible when the duck is at rest.

I have seen plenty of green-winged teals along the BC coast but didn't get a good look at a blue-winged teal until I spent time around Edmonton.  These birds are actually present throughout most North America, although they are absent from Canada's west coast area.  They are mostly freshwater species and feed in shallow ponds by upending themselves into a vertical profile to reach benthic plants (primarily) and incidental invertebrates.  This kind of inverted feeding is called dabbling.

I photographed this from my kayak.  My camera's drive mode was set to high-speed continuous; I took 11 photographs in just a hair over one second while the bird flew past me.  The shutter speed was 1/800th of a second so the camera was firing away at its maximum number of frames per second, which is about 10 for the D500 Nikon.  That feature in itself was one of the reasons that I use this camera, another is that it has a large memory buffer and allows me to capture quite a few images before it fills up.

I want to mention what memory buffer is and why its size is important.  The memory buffer in a camera is a high-speed type of RAM that temporarily stores information, in this case picture files.  The number of images the buffer can hold depends wildly on the camera, the frame rate, the type and size of file being created, and the memory card being read to.  Since I use only RAW files, the maximum number of photos I can shoot continuously is around 35 if I am using a standard SD memory card.  If I use an XQD card, that number increases to over 100.

That is actually a very impressive value because other Nikon cameras (D7000 series) range in the 10-20 number.  Before getting my D500 I would shoot with one of these cameras and end up maxing out my buffer before I was done shooting.  That's the problem with small memory buffers - the camera locks up when the buffer is full and it takes quite some time before it is totally freed up.  The length of time again depends on quite a few variables.

If you want to play with it yourself, try this.  Set your shutter speed to a high value (1/400th or faster).  Adjust ISO and aperture to produce a reasonable image.  Set the drive mode to its highest setting (single, low continuous, high continuous) and set the camera's focus to manual mode (helps speed up the photos if no focusing is to be done).  Make sure you have a large, empty card in the slot (16 GB or more).  Press and hold the shutter button down.  How many pictures did you get before the camera stopped?  Change the file type to RAW and do the same again.  Any difference?  Play around with the values and see how it all behaves.  When you are done just format the memory card and you will have a ready-to-go card without a cluster of test files.

Camera performance and cost are usually correlated.  Expect cameras that have higher-end features to be more expensive than lower-end cameras. Typically there are many other significant differences as well; today I have only mentioned one of them.

Thanks for reading.   www.ericspix.com