Posts in Category: Everglades NP

Purple Gallinules Meet You at the Airport!

Purple Gallinule, Shark Valley, Everglades NP

Purple Gallinule, Shark Valley, Everglades NP

In honor of being on my way back to Florida (I am currently in Newark waiting on a connection), another Purple Gallinule. If you don’t get the reference…one of my girls’ favorite children’s books was “Gila Monsters Meet You At the Airport.”

Sony HX400V. 705mm equivalent field of view. 1/1250th @ ISO1000 @ f5.6. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.

Yellow-crowned Night Heron

Yellow-crowned Night Heron, Shark Valley, Everglades NP

Though I know of at least a few Maine records for Yellow-crowned Night Heron, I have never seen one here…I see them in Georgia, Texas, Ohio, and Florida…and not often at that. This specimen was along West Road at Shark Valley in the Everglades. Who can resist? Night Herons always look grumpy to me, and the Yellow-crown more than most…like they are having a bad day and have no reason to think it will get any better…or that tomorrow will be anything but more of the same. 🙁 This bird manages, as I see it, to rise to a stoic look…which is pretty good natured for a Night Heron. 🙁

Sony HX400V at 950mm equivalent. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 640 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.

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.

Everglades String Lily

String Lily. Shark Valley. Everglades NP

December, when we spent our week in the Everglades, is not the flower season. If you are into flowers spring is probably when you want to be in the Everglades. Still, there were flowers. This is the String Lily and it was everywhere we went in the Everglades. We passed by hundreds of them in the river of grass during our airboat ride (they are so common we ran over more than a few…the airboat does no damage). They were along the boardwalks at Royal Palm. They grew in the channels along the roads at Shark Valley. They were, just about, everywhere you looked in the Everglades and Big Cypress. According to my reference, both the leaves and bulb of this plant are poisonous to humans, but they are the favored food to the big Lubber Grasshopper. This is a particularly classic shot, framed against the dark water, and with the purple stamens standing tall.

Sony HX400V at about 540mm equivalent field of view. In camera HDR. Nominal exposure 1/800th @ ISO 80 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.

 

 

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.

 

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.

 

Great Southern White

Great Southern White: Eco Pond, Falmingo, Everglades National Park

We saw Gulf Fritterlaries and Zebra Longwings (butterflies) pretty much everywhere in the Everglades, but we only saw the Great Southern White at the far south end, out toward the Flamingo Campground along the Eco Pond trail…and there we saw hundreds of them. I tried hard to make this a Florida White, but I am pretty sure it is just a Great Southern. Florida White is more common in the shade and more restricted in habitat…to the point of being endangered. The Great Southern is by far the more common of the two. In my brief research this morning I could find no information that would give me confidence in distinguishing the two, so GSW is the default id here. 🙂

Sony HX400V at 1300mm equivalent field of view (just into Clear Image Zoom for the slightly closer focus). 1/640th @ ISO 100 @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.