Perfect light, a cooperative bird, a new camera, and my ZEISS DiaScope 65FL spotting scope. Life is good.

I went out to the beach early yesterday morning to see what hurricane Irene had left us in the way of birds. It looks to me like Plovers stacked up here…they were present in good numbers…including a Black-bellied Plover, which is rare on our beaches. And we had half a dozen each of Great Blue Herons and Great Egrets. We get both here in those kinds of numbers, but not all together and not on the same day. We were out at the edge of Irene’s diminished track as it came up through New England so these are likely birds who rode the winds out from the interior to safety and relative calm on the marshes behind the beach.

There were a several of these Juvenile Semi-palms feeding along the shore of the little tidal creek where it passes under a bridge. I set up about 40 feet above them, in the strong morning light, and practiced with my new Nikon P300. (The Nikon P500 has done so well by me that when it became time to replace my digiscoping camera I felt safe in getting a close sibling.) This shot shows the full potential of the camera. If you look at it on Wide Eyed In Wonder (click the image) you can view it at much larger sizes to see all the detail. It was taken through the 15-56x Vario eyepiece on the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL. The camera was at about 77mm equivalent and the scope at about 30x for an equivalent field of view of about 2300mm. 1/500th @ ISO 160. Programmed auto. The effective f-stop was around 6.4, limited by the objective of the scope.

Processed in Lightroom for Clarity and Sharpness.