Posts in Category: wildlife
Heliconians: National Butterfly Center
Haliconians. Zebra and Julia
Longwings (Haliconians) are among my favorite Rio Grande Valley butterflies. They are, to me, the very definition of exotic. Graceful, slow fliers, they often nectar with wings fully spread so they are ideal photographic subjects, and there is nowhere better to photograph them than the National Butterfly Center in Mission TX. I always attempt to spend at least a morning at the NBC on every trip to the Rio Grande Valley. Here we have the Zebra, one of the first butterflies to great me at the NBC gardens proper, and Julia, which another visiting couple pointed me to later in the morning.
Sony HX400V at various focal lengths. Processed and cropped in Lightroom on my Windows tablet. Assembled in Phototastic.
Classic Greater Yellowlegs
Greater Yellowlegs
Sometimes it is hard to tell a Greater from a Lesser Yelowlegs. Not so here. These are classic Greaters with the bill showing clearly a third again as long as the head. I found these three feeding avidly in the pools along the Kennebunk Bridle Path, where we always get a few stopping over during migration.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent fielf of view. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 500 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Lenovo Miix 2 11 tablet.
ob Chipper standing.
This was the last shot from a photoprowl around the loop at Rachel Carson NWR headquarters on a gloomy day at the tail end of October. Made the whole walk worthwhile! (Not that it was not already worthwhile 🙂
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 3200 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Windows tablet.
Short and sweet today as I am at the airport on my way to the Rio Grande Birding Festival in Texas. 🙂
Palm Warbler: feathers! Happy Sunday.
Palm Warbler: Cape May NJ
Nothing beats a sunny morning in Cape May after the passage of a front in the night. The birds pile up at places like the Meadows, Higbee Beach, and the dike. They are so busy feeding they pay little attention to us. This is in the overgrown meadows at Higbee. A Palm Warbler. It does not get any better than this!
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 160 @ f6.3. Processed and cropped slightly in Lighroom on my Windows tablet.
Part of what attracts me to birds and bird photography is intricate detail of feathers. Good binoculars or a good camera can catch every little interlocking barb of the flight and body feathers, and every plume of the downy breast. If you are on a tablet or have a touch screen, zoom in on the back of this bird. (If not click to open in another window and zoom.) See what I mean? Every barb!
I find it satisfying that the beauty of a bird can be appreciated from the form and color of the living creature, the active aliveness of it that you can see with the naked eye, right down to the unlikely design of feathers. And of course I find it hard to imagine that any amount of chance and natural selection could have ever resulted in anything as amazing as a feather. On the other hand, I can easily imagine that the feather was created, was actively designed by an intelligence, and more than that, an intelligence with a sense of wonder and delight…a loving intelligence with a true appreciation of functional beauty. While I might feel a kinship with that intelligence, expressed in my own sense of wonder and delight, I know that the feather is so far beyond my power to conceive that I can only be awe of such a being, of such love. I don’t believe because of the feather. My belief is based on a living encounter with love itself, but the feather certainly conforms to my faith, is another chime in the great chord of faith that informs my life.
It is, unfortunately, all too easy for the pressures and confusions of daily life to obscure my faith, to mute the chord…but a day with the birds, and few images like this one…a few feathers always serves to bring faith, and my sense of wonder, swelling to the full. Happy Sunday!
Squirrelatude!
Big Grey Squirrel
This big Grey Squirrel in Cape May NJ was taking none of my guff! He had found a cache of acorns, and was busy fattening up for the winter He was not about to surrender the ground to me…at least not without quite a squirrel fuss. 🙂 This is a close to defensive posture as he got. As soon as he had assessed my threat (correctly;), the was back at the acorns.
Back in business
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. ISO 640 and 3200. Processed in Lightroom on my Windows tablet.
White-throated Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Though range maps show that the White-throated Sparrow is a year round resident all along the coast of Maine, I am pretty sure I have never seen one in Maine before yesterday. Odd. Of course it could just be my aging synapses… This specimen is on the Kennebunk Bridle Trail, along the lower Mousam River, only a mile or so from my front door. Such a bright, perky, bird…for a sparrow that is. 🙂 The light was dim, already late in the day, and overcast, and this shot really stretches the limits of the Point and Shoot camera.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 3200 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Windows tablet. I am totally amazed at the quality that the HX400V is capable of at such a high ISO. Totally unexpected! And totally appreciated.
American Goldfinch Feeding
American Goldfinch. Higbee Beach, Cape May NJ
It was a great few days for bird photography in Cape May last weekend. I did not get out to Higbee Beach until Sunday evening after we had closed the show and packed up the booth. (I was working the Cape May Autumn Bird Festival for ZEISS.) The late day light warmed everything, including this American Goldfinch busy feeding in the overgrown meadows at Higbee.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 640 @ f6.3. Processed and cropped slightly in Lightroom on my Lenovo MIIX tablet. (The Surface Pro fell off the podium while I was doing a program in Cape May and smashed the screen 🙁 The Lenovo is an emergency substitute.)
White-tailed Curiosity
White-tailed Deer
I got out early only one morning in Cape May, but that morning I was early enough to catch the White-tailed Deer still browsing along the boardwalk behind the Hawk Watch Platform at Lighthouse State Park. They have been clearing non-native brush and created a small opening on one side of the boardwalk. A doe and two fawns, of different ages, were feeding there. The deer at the State Park are well used to humans on the boardwalk. I stood there in the open watching them continue to feed, unconcerned. In fact, the younger of the two fawns stopped feeding long enough to come over to the boardwalk for a closer look at me. He got close enough so that I could have petted his nose. 🙂
It as really early and the light under the dense canopy was dim enough so that even at ISO 1600 I had to dial the shutter speed down to dangerously low levels, but I managed a few acceptable shots. Sony HX400V at 560 mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/160th @ ISO 1600 @ f6.3. Processed in Snapseed.
,??,
Comma Butterfly
The Comma and the Question Mark are relatively large Bushfoot Butterflies. They are both found in New England but I rarely see either. They look enough alike so I always have to consult the guide when I do. Their distinguishing mark, and the mark that gives them their names, is a tiny squiggle on the underwing, which looks slightly more like a comma in one and slightly more like a question mark in the other. You really need the bug in hand to use that, so I go by the extra dot on the upper forewing on the Comma. This specimen is from my final walk (for this trip) around the trails behind the Hawk Watch at Cape May Point Lighthouse State Park in Cape May New Jersey.
Sony HX400V at 2400mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 250 @ f6.3. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet.
White-crowned Head-and-shoulders
Brown Variant White-crowned Sparrow
Cape May, on a good day during fall migration, provides abundant opportunities for intimate portraits of many species. This week the White-crowned Sparrow was the third most abundant patisserie, running close behind Tree Swallows and Yellow-rumped Warblers. This brown variant was.feeding behind the Hawk Watch platform at Lighthouse State Park.
Clear Image zoom on the Sony HX400V extends the reach to 2400mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/500th @ ISO 100 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom.