Posts in Category: wildlife
He got feet…
Purple Gallinule, Anhinga Boardwalk, Royal Palm VC, Everglades NP
Yet another Purple Gallinule from the Everglades. This shot really shows off the feet, as the bird climbs over a twig near the water. The angle, taken from above on the elevated Anhinga Boardwalk at Royal Palm Visitor Center, is also somewhat different.
Sony HX400V. Around 450mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 400 @ f5.6. Cropped for scale and processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Robin in Winter
American Robin with winter berries.
I went out briefly yesterday when it finally warmed up into the double digits to look, among other things, for the flock of Robins that winter in Kennebunk to see if the Western Tanager is still with them. They were not in the neighborhood where they were a week ago when I went looking and did find the Tanager, but when I went down to Roger’s Pond to check on Eagles and ducks at the edge of the ice on the Mousam River, the whole flock was there. They were eating berries from an ornamental tree that grows near the picnic shelter. I am not sure what kind of tree it is, but it is heavy with clusters of red fruit that look a little like cherries. The Robins love them, but they are right at the limits of what a Robin can swallow whole. They hold them in their beaks for a few seconds, apparently getting up the courage to toss them up and catch when with their mouths open. When it works, the fruit goes down whole. It does not, apparently, work as often as the Robins would like. The whole flock was cycling in and out of this one tree, no bird sitting longer than it took to harvest a single fruit. The Tanager was not with them, that I saw, but I got some good shots of the Robins feeding. The early afternoon winter light was perfect. I know, it is only an American Robin, but in Maine, in winter, we can not be picky! And I think the shot stands well on its own on its compositional merits.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 500 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet. This shot shows the advantage of a small sensor super-zoom. Notice the depth of field that has the bird, beak to feet, in focus at the same time. And yet it still produces effective bokeh in the background. 🙂
ABA Bird of the Year!
Green Heron. Anhinga Boardwalk, Everglades NP
“Hey! What are you looking at?! I swear, since they made me ABA Bird of Year, I can’t go anywhere without drawing a crowd. No privacy. No time off for good behavior. I am expected to be super-star quality all the time, every moment. The pressure! I can’t peek out of my reeds and brush without some photographer snapping a pic. And fishing? Forget fishing. Have you ever tried to fish with a crowd of photographers looking over your shoulder? They are trying to photograph every fish and caterpillar I take. I think they are keeping score. Green Heron 4, fish 24. Like that. Pressure.
“And the other herons are giving me a real hard time about it. “What makes you so special all of a sudden. What are we? Feather dummies?” And the Egrets. They are fit to be tied…you have not been snubbed until you have been snubbed by a Snowy Egret and don’t even get me started on the Greats! The Cattle Egrets just blow raspberries and giggle. It is really doing a number on my nerves.
“And they aren’t paying me anything at all…certainly not what I am worth. I mean, this is some kind of endorsement deal right? I need a new agent. Near as I can see the ABA is raking it using my name, my reputation, my star-power, and I get nothing! How is that fair? I don’t remember signing the papers that said they could use my face in this Bird of the Year thing.
“And now I got the IRS on my back too! Give me a break. I can’t wait for 2015 to be over. I ought to go just hide in the deep reeds until then…and I would, but I do feel some obligation to my fans. Maybe at least everyone will stop calling me a Green-back Heron by the end of the year. Didn’t anybody get the memo about the name change? What does a bird have to do? I don’t need the INS on me too.
“So, buddy, this is the face you get…this is my ABA Bird of the Year face! Like it or lump it. It is not like I asked for it or anything…”
Sony HX400V. 818mm equivalent field of view. 1/640th @ ISO 500 @ f5.6. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Another Purple Gallinule
Purple Gallinule. Shark Valley. Everglades NP
I will admit to having an unaccountable fondness for the Purple Gallinule. It is, as I may have said before, just such an outrageous bird. I was nothing short of delighted to find so many in the Everglades when we visited last month. I had only ever seen two before…one male, years ago, and one female a few years later. The Everglades filled me up, for the moment, with Purple Gallinule. 🙂
I like this shot particularly, as it shows just about every interesting aspect of the bird…and shows it in its natural habitat.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 250 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Western Tanager: long way from home! Happy Sunday.
Western Tanager in Kennebunk ME on Jan 3rd.
I posted briefly about my adventures finding and photographing a Western Tanager that has been hanging out with a flock of Robins in a neighborhood a little less than a mile from my home in Kennebunk Maine. Actually, “refinding” is better…it was seen twice on the Kennebunk Christmas Bird Count on December 27th, but I did not hear about it until the day before yesterday. A Western Tanager in Maine is news anytime, but you would think that late December and early January would be among the most unlikely times. You would think…but, in fact, the last record of Western Tanager in Maine that I can find was also on a Christmas Bird Count in Bangor in 2006. Western Tanagers breed all along the backbone of the Rocky Mountains, on both sides, west to the coast and east to the great plains, and are supposed to migrate to extreme southern Baha California, and from northern Mexico south as far as Costa Rica in the winter. They are not supposed to be in Maine. There are always a few birds in any migrating species that get their internal compass turned around and head the wrong way. The Tanager in Maine undoubtedly started out for Mexico. There is a remote chance that if the food holds out it could actually survive winter in Maine…or, when food gets scarce, that it will follow the flock of Robins to better foraging not far from us, or even higher in the mountains. Robins, despite the “first Robin of Spring” thing are not long distance migrants…in fact they are year-round residents of coastal Maine and most of the US. They are just less visible, and certainly less vocal, in winter. Only time will tell the fate of the Western Tanager foraging with them.
The most critical time for the Tanager, if it survives the Maine winter, will be next spring, when it is time to go home. Chances of its clearly defective guidance system getting it all the way back across the full width of the continent to its breeding areas in the mountains of the west are, realistically, pretty slim.
Although they are no more slim, come right down to it, than the chances of its being in Maine in January in the first place. 🙂
As strange and wonderful as the presence of the bird is, I have to wonder what the good folks who happen to live in the quiet little back street neighborhood in Kennebunk must think about the sudden influx of people with binoculars and cameras. People who stand in the middle of the street looking up into the trees and poke their binos and lenses into back yards…serious expectant people most of the time…but also excited, highly animated…obviously joyful people from time to time. They must look out their windows and wonder what in the world they are missing. Even if they see the Robin flock, which is pretty hard to miss, they are unlikely to pick out the one odd bird among them. And I am sure not a few of them are already tired of strangers, and strange behavior, on their streets.
I have thought before this about how much birding is like a religion…a fellowship of the initiated and the aware…a community with a common focus and a common language…a shared source of joy. I first started looking for the Tanager because I observed obvious birder behavior on my drive up my street and stopped to find out what was going on. I knew I was missing something and had to find out what it was.
I would like to have a faith so strong some day that people who saw my obvious excitement and joy in living would wonder what they were missing. Someday. And more than that, I hope that every time I find myself as far from my spiritual home as the Western Tanager is from his physical one, I will find a flock of Robins of the faith who know where the food is. 🙂
Happy Sunday!
Lunch
Anhinga with Bullhead: Shark Valley, Everglades NP
With as many Anhingas (Anhingi?) as we saw in the Everglades, and given that Anhingas are always on the hunt, it was just about inevitable that we would find an Anhinga with prey. This is apparently an invasive fish of the Bullhead variety. Like the Cormorant, the Anhinga spears its prey with that long sharp beak, and then beats it to submission on the branches of its perch, before maneuvering it lengthwise and swallowing it whole. It was still in the beating it to submission stage here. I have video to prove it 🙂
Sony HX400V at about 750mm equivalent field of view. 1/640th @ ISO 640 @ f5.6. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Flight Check
Little Blue Heron preening at Shark Valley, Everglades NP
Right place at the right time, and ready. That is the secret to great wildlife photography…or great photography of any kind. Of course the secret to wildlife photography sanity is that you just can’t count (or obsess over) the misses…those times when you were in the right place at the right time, and not ready 🙂 In the field you will miss as often…some days (some weeks, some months, some years) way more often…than you hit. You have to celebrate every hit and forget every miss.
There were lots of Little Blue Herons along the water course that lines West Road at Shark Valley in Everglades National Park…it was inevitable (well, highly probably, give the numbers) that I would have my camera on one when it decided to preen. Auto focus managed this very well…better than I could have using manual. Even so, I was in Shutter Preferred and at 1/2000th of a second…way faster than I needed to be…and that pushed the ISO way up…which limits the quality of the photo…still…I count it a hit. And so the image gets made.
Sony HX400V at 504mm equivalent field of view (the bird was close!). 1/2000th @ ISO 2000 @ f5.6. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Reflection
Green Heron. Anhinga Trail, Royal Palm, Everglades NP
A week in the Everglades gave me many opportunities for Green Heron. Unlike some of the heron/egret species, Green Herons are relatively solitary birds…each staking out its own daily hunting territory and sticking pretty close. Even so, the sheer number of Green Herons, and the richness of the hunting, mean that you see numbers of them along any stretch of suitable water. On the Anhinga Boardwalk, there would be, basically, one every 50 feet or so, sometimes two as close as 30 feet. I like the way this one is stretched out over its reflection. The image is cropped slightly to place the diagonal of the branch in the upper right corner to emphasize the symmetry. (Roy Halpin, who was shooting with me in the Everglades, has an almost identical image of this bird 🙂
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 250 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Snowy with great bokeh
Snowy Egret. Shark Valley. Everglades National Park
I used this image in a post on Point and Shoot Nature Photographer yesterday as an example of the background making the shot…but it deserves the full Pic 4 Today treatment. And, yes, to my eye, the background does make the shot. The swirling highlights in the dark water elevate an ordinary portrait of a Snow Egret to something really special. And the thing is, this is one of those images that I did not see, could not see, coming. Through the viewfinder or on the LCD the water in the background was in sharp focus and the highlights were still in motion. It was only in Lightroom, when I punched up the image with my standard Sony preset, that the background jumped out! Of course, I love the feather detail in the white bird as well, and the bright yellow of the eye and ceres (skin between the eye and beak). But it is the background that makes the image.
I found the Egret, and a lot of other great birds, in the first mile and a half of the West Road at Shark Valley, in Everglades National Park. West Road is my new most favorite bird photography location!
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 320 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Everglades Zebra Heliconian
Zebra Longwing (Heliconian). Flamingo area, Everglades NP
We did not have a huge number of butterflies the second week in December in south Florida. The temperatures were unseasonably cool, for the area, and most butterflies, even if active in December, were tucked in tight somewhere keeping warm. The exception was the Zebra Longwing (or Heliconian). They were pretty much everywhere we went and flying by mid-morning. Maybe “fluttering” would be more accurate with this bug, as their flight is about as floppy and hesitant as a butterfly gets. I chased a few down when we saw them for photos. This one is on the Coastal Prairie / Bay Shore Loop Trail just at the far edge of the Flamingo campground, about as far south in the Park as you can get. I like the background here (it has, as they say, good bokeh), and I like the exposure, which preserves the saturation in the yellow bands…too often a picture of this bug will show white bands due to the contrast between the black and yellow and the difficulty of exposing for both.
Sony HX400V at just over 1200mm equivalent field of view. Going just slightly into the Clear Image Zoom (digital) zoom range decreases the minimum focus to something in the 6 foot range and gives the best tel-macro effect on the Sony. 1/640th @ ISO 160 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.