Personally, I prefer this serene solo piano music for accompaniment when filming swans, much as I fondly recall melancholy flute music for CBC's Hinterland Shorts.  The trick is to MIX the site audio with the accompaniment and using the faders to modulate the mix.  In other words, either the site recording, or the accompaniment predominates at any one moment in the production, therefore providing a give-and-take, a shifting balance to suit the bird behaviour.  A third channel on the mixer allows for your narration, when needed, without gating everything else on the score.  Nature shorts generally don't need foley, so then all you would need is three audio channels.  My gut reaction is that no one audio component should predominate for too long because of the steep profile of attention saturation, which leads to a short attention span.  Change in audio keeps it fresh and therefore helps support the change in characters appearing on the screen.  Even in the movies, different actors get different music.  We always know when Darth Vader is about to enter the picture by the prelude.  Who would be the Darth Vader of waterfowl?  I don't rightly know.  OMG, that's it ... a black swan!  Quick, go find Casting.  I'm so excited.

Up until recently I wouldn't have been able to make that declaration.  I got a rough idea of what a harrier looks like in flight last year because of repeated distant sightings at Cranberry Marsh.  For some reason the harrier(s) at that site were always romancing the horizon and only came down to the beach on days that I was absent.  This spring I've come to appreciate how light in colour this raptor is.  Although still relatively far from me, over a 100 meters distant, the pictured harrier is not as far as the one at Cranberry, which might be better ranged in parsecs.  Anyway, the bird appears very pale, a light gray colour, and is easily lost from sight when it skims a few feet above the grassy stubble.  I may return to the same location early tomorrow morning, before the clouds roll in and the wet snow commences.  Fortunately it's close to home.  I also spotted a harrier while driving north on the York/Durham Town Line but there was no shoulder to pull over, and no shoulder to cry on.  Another lost opportunity.

Once again, a Northern harrier hunting over the fields belonging to the Rouge.  Poor light and distance are hard to manage.  The bluebird in the sumac was probably thinking ... give it up, dude.

Great picture.

This morning an adult shrike.  By the absence of barring on the breast and the continuity of the mask across the bill I'm guess it's a Loggerhead shrike on this occasion.


Loggerhead shrike


Continuity of mask across beak




Shrike ejecting an undigested bolus ... eee-gads!