I arrived in Orlando several hours before my colleague on our way to Titusville and the Space Coast Birding Festival, so I picked up the rental car and drove the 20 minutes to Gatorland and it’s world famous rookery. It is justifiably famous. A boardwalk along the edges of a swampy pond gives easy access, in season, to hundreds of nesting pairs of the big waders: Wood Stork, Great and Snowy Egret, Great Blue Heron, Black-Crowned Night Heron, White Ibis, Spoonbill were all present and accounted for yesterday. I suspect they also get Tricolored, Little Blue, and Green Heron in the true breeding season. Only the Great Egrets were showing any signs of nesting this early.

Gatorland is,  of course,  a great place for bird photography. It is the kind of place where even those with phone and small Point &  Shoot cameras can get impressive shots. The birds are close, and since they live pretty much on a diet of hot dog chunks the tourists are encouraged to throw at the alligators, they are beyond tame…the Wood Storks in particular are right up on the boardwalk soliciting, often at arms length, walking among the tourists as though it were the most natural thing in the world. Close encounters are so common that it is, in fact, a bit disturbing. I mean, these birds are not trained and they may not captive, but the are certainly not wild either. I lost a good deal of my respect for Wood Storks yesterday. 🙁

Still I managed to shoot almost 800 frames in two hours at Gatorland. Culled of close duplicates and whittled down to the keepers, that still amounts to over a hundred bird images…from super intimate, macro-esque portraits, to environmental and even a few flight shots.

This is a Great Egret, and this is what I mean by a macro-esque portrait 🙂  It was taken at about 6 feet at 1200mm equivalent field of view with the Canon SX50HS. ISO 500 @ 1/1000th @ f6.5. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.

Like I say, I have a hundred images so without doubt you will be seeing more of the Gatorland take!