Posts in Category: Merritt Island NWR
Spoonbill Reflection
This year the Roseate Spoonbills at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge were simply not as cooperative as in past years when I visited in January. I saw a couple flyovers, and found one group feeding…but they were only a few, and they were way in the back of a pond on the second half of the loop. Of course maybe it was just my timing, but I did manage to get out both early and late.
And I did have my digiscoping rig with me, so I was able to get decent shots even with the birds at a distance. This was taken with the Sony Rx100 behind the 15-56x Vario Eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL spotting scope. Using both the zoom on the camera and the zoom on the spotting scope resulted in about a 3000mm equivalent field of view. That is a lot of reach. 1/100th @ ISO 125. Program mode. f18 effective (f5.6 on the camera).
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Early Ibis
If I seem to have a lot of dawn and early light shots from my last trip to the Space Coast Birding Festival you can blame it on the realities of actually working the festivals, as opposed to attending the festivals. If I want any time in the field, I have to take it before the festival and the vendor area opens for the day. That means eating breakfast on the move (nothing so sustaining in the morning as a Cliff Bar breakfast) and being in the field or on the refuge (Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in this case) by first light.
I posted a Pelican flyover image a few days ago that was taken at this same stop. I mentioned then that I was photographing White Ibis in the first direct sun of a very early morning. This is one of those shots. There was so much yellow light in the reflected light from the surface of the water that I had to tone it down in Lightroom.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Wood Stork, Great Egret, White Ibis Populate the Dawn
This is another shot from my Sunday dawn stop on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. As the sun came up the birds came in to feed in the small pools below Stop #2, and the light, coming low over the misty marsh behind them, made for wonderful images. Here we have a Wood Stork (the only one in this mixed flock of birds), one of several Great Egrets, and one of hundreds of White Ibises just entering the frame. I like this image for the light, but also for the dynamic tension between the three birds, and the “caught in action” pose of the Stork. The image would not work, with the Stork walking out of the frame, if not for the strong anchor of the Egret at the bottom center.
Canon SX50HS at about 360mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/320th @ ISO 800. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation.
Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Blackpoint Drive Dawn: Happy Sunday!
Okay. We have 5 foot drifts of snow in the yard, the shoveled pile at the end of the drive is over 7 feet tall (thank you Nemo), and it is –2 degrees on the thermometer. It is a good morning to skip back, at least in spirit, two Sundays to this “chilly” dawn on Blackpoint Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge in Florida. They are promising that it will warm up into the 30s in Southern Maine today, with clear sky and lots of sunshine, so tomorrow you will very likely see a winter snow scene here. But for today, let us remember warmer times and warmer places 
This was one of those dawns when the sun kissed the mists over the marsh, and, in a few more moments after this shot, turned the grasses gold. This is the spot where the flock of Ibis flew in to join the egrets feeding (Ibises in the Dawn), where the Snowy perched in a tree against the gold (Google+)…this is the place where the Wood Stork settled and posed against the warm light (Woodie!). It is hard, in our culture, to avoid using the word “magical” to describe such an experience…except that magic has no place in my chosen view of the world. It was a blessed dawn. It was dawn full of grace and wonder. It was an awesome dawn in every sense.
Technically, to capture just a glimmer of that wonder, I shot this image using In-camera HDR Mode, with the Canon SX50HS on my little Fat Gecko shock-cord carbon fiber tripod. There was a Refuge sign on the right that stuck into the frame, and a bit of the gravel and sand of the pull-out showing in the bottom right corner. I used the clone tool in PhotoShop Elements 11 to paint out the sign and fill in the gravel, and cropped and processed the image for full effect in Lightroom.
And for me, veering off into the technical this way does not diminish the wonder of the experience at all. I am truly thankful, and can even spare a little awe , for the engineers and image scientists at Canon who make a shot like this relatively easy with today’s best Point and Shoot cameras. I even give thanks for the Fat Gecko tripod, which I take places like this where I would not pack a “real” tripod. And, of course, the folks at Adobe who work on PhotoShop Elements and Lightroom deserve a huge measure of gratitude. They are so much a part of my creative process that I find it hard to imagine working without them. Even my Toshiba Ultrabook is essential to the experience. Finally, there is this medium…the internet, Facebook, Google+, WordPress, all working together to allow me to share the experience with you.
And it all comes together in the image…or rather in the experience of creating the image…in responding to the dawn by attempting to catch what I can of it, and of sharing it with you.
So there is no specific Sunday Thought today. Just the image and the experience, from seeing to capture to processing to sharing. There is the wonder. There is awesomness shot all through, like the light of dawn kissing the marsh and turning it to gold.
Early Morning Pelican Flyover
I was standing along Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge on a Sunday morning, soon after dawn, taking pics of some ibises and egrets in the corner of one of the ponds when an American White Pelican flew overhead. I turned and saw several others on their way in. Sports Mode is never more than a click away on the Canon SX50HS, and I got of a burst as a bird approached, panning with it, This shot is pretty much straight overhead, and my head was tipped back about as far as it would go. 
I really like the early light here, following the bird, and illuminating and modeling the body under the wings and the head over them…and the touch of translucence at the base of the wings themselves. The bird strikes me as “stately” or “proud” in its glide.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. 190mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly for composition and scale.
Reddish Egret at Work
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Okay, I will admit it. I am strangely attracted to Reddish Egrets. Attracted because I really like to watch them feed. It never fails to bring a smile, as they wobble about on loose knees, generally well off kilter. Strangely because, well, because Reddish Egrets are so strange…every movement exaggerated and slightly awkward…and yet the whole fits together into a kind of dance that has its own grace.
And then there is the bird itself, with its ragged red neck and head above your standard heron-gray body. It always looks like it is wearing a bad purple wig.
These images are from along the Wild Birds Unlimited trail off Blackpoint Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Drive.
Canon SX50HS. Sports Mode. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
January Brown Anole
The Brown Anole is an introduced species in Florida, unlike the native Green Anole. Unfortunately is very invasive. There has been a colony of Brown Anoles living in the rocks along the pond by the restrooms on Black Point Wildlife Drive at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge for as long as I have been going there (10 years). They are were much more active during my few April visits, but on warm days in January you can still see them sunning themselves on the rocks. I like the curl of this one’s tail.
Canon SX50HS in Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1200mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Ibises in the Dawn
Five white Ibises and a Glossy coming in to land just after dawn at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge. I had to look up the plural of Ibis. Turns out that in the vernacular the members of group of individual Ibis are Ibises. The group that includes all Ibises is, however, more properly Ibides or Ibide. Such is the mess that is our Latinized Anglo Saxon French hodgepodge of a language. 
White Ibises are common on the Refuge in January, but, until I looked closely at this image, I would have told you I had not seen a Glossy on this trip.
This is an example of how fast and flexible the Canon SX50HS is. I was taking sunrise pics of the waders in a small channel at Stop 2 on Blackpoint Wildlife Drive when I saw a group of birds coming in. I spun the control dial to Sports Mode, backed off on the zoom for framing, got focus on them, and got off a burst of shots as they passed close. Not bad! You can see the far out-of-focus shadows of a foreground palm they were about to fly behind on the left side of the frame.
Canon SX50HS as above. 655mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 500. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. Cropped slightly on the right to eliminate random bird wings.
Common Buckeye: Merritt Island NWR
I was really hoping to bring home some dragonfly pics from this last trip to Florida. When I was in South Texas in November, there were dragonflies everywhere. I was not seriously looking at dragonflies last January when I was in Florida so I did not know what to expect. I hoped though. I kept my eye out at Merritt Island NWR, and I even got out of the car and walked a section of the dyke roads at Viera Wetlands. I did see a few (maybe 3) dragonflies in flight at a distance, but nothing I could either identify or photograph. 
The Butterflies, however, were very present. They were mostly Florida Whites, by the thousands, but I found a few Skippers, a Peacock, a Gulf Fritillary, and this well worn Common Buckeye as well. (All of the butterflies were well worn…summer butterflies lingering into winter, or migrants from the north.)
Canon SX50HS at 1800mm equivalent field of view (full optical zoom plus 1.5x Digital Tel-converter). f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 320. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. Minus 1/3 EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Mockingbird
While the big birds…the Wood Storks, herons, egrets and ibises…certainly get most of the attention at Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge (or the ducks if you are duck fancier), there are, of course, lots of passerines on the Refuge as well. There are still Florida Scrub Jays if you know where to look, and many thousand Palm Warblers in January when I visit. Common Yellowthroats chitter in the mangrove at just about every stop. And then there are Northern Mockingbirds. This specimen jumped up to the top of the mangrove lining Blackpoint Drive just as I was pulling out onto the drive from a stop, so, of course, I had to stop the car, roll down the window and catch a few shots.
This is 1200mm equivalent field of view…the longest optical reach of the Canon SX50HS’ zoom…handheld from inside the car. With the wonderful Florida early morning light picking out every detail, and the classic pose, it makes wonderful portrait of the bird.
f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Program with iContrast and Auto Shadow Fill. –1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.