For Wings on Wednesday.

We were all done at Talbert Marsh and the mouth of the Santa Ana river and trudging back to the car for the next part of the adventure (Bolsa Chica, see Point & Shoot 4 Wildlife takes a Tern at Bolsa Chica), scopes and cameras shouldered, when we came up on this Black-crowned Night-heron feeding at the near edge of the marsh. We were about to march right past…I mean, all of us have hundreds of shots of BCNH on our hard-drives, and the light was not great (misty and dull, Orange County June gloom), and then I thought, and then said, “We have to do this bird. My theory is: if you don’t do the easy birds when given the chance, then you won’t be given a chance at the good ones or the hard ones.” So we downed tripods and scopes, upped cameras, and shot the BCNH. It would have been the height of ingratitude to do otherwise.

Canon SD4000is behind the 20-75x Vario eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 85FL for the equivalent field of view of a 1400mm lens on a full frame DSLR, 1/250th @ ISO 125, f3.5 effective.

Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.

And zoomed up a little to about 2500mm equivalent.