BirdCam upgrade, with sparrow

I bought my backyard Bird/RaccoonCam three years ago. It is a bit primitive; three distance settings, no viewfinder, fixed size, and strange colour balance, so when I saw a new model in the Lee Valley catalog I ordered it, and set it up yesterday.

It's still a bare-bones camera, but the resolution is better, and there are a few options, like shape and size of the image, and more distance settings. The first batch of photos, with the camera set to 11 inches, turned out more or less ok; noisy, but more or less in focus, and the right colour.

White crowned sparrow, with hulled sunflower seed.

And I learned something.

Chickadees are very polite birds. They take turns dropping down to pick up one sunflower seed, and fly away to hull and eat it on a branch, leaving the rest for others. When they're done, they come back, pick up one seed, and go away again. Everybody gets their share.

This white-crowned sparrow is not so considerate. He stays put, eating until there is nothing left. And in photo after photo, he had stuffed his bill with three or four seeds at once.

"Mine, mine, mine!"

Just like a kid with candy. Or Tex, the hermit crab. Is it greed, or gluttony? Or just bad table manners?