Though the light was miserable, and it was actually drizzling a bit, I set up on the palm-nesting Herons at Viera Wetlands. It was our last morning in the field for the Space Coast Birding Festival, and we left the hotel early to get to Viera just as there was enough light for photopraphy. We had not counted on the rain. Still, who is going to pass up Great Blue Herons nesting on the broken off tops of palm trunks? I was using my compact digiscoping rig…the ZEISS DiaScope 65FL and the 15-56x Vario eyepiece with the Digidapter for ZEISS mount. I had just received a newish Canon SD320HS to try behind the lens. This is, in fact, a 2012 model in the Canon HS series, but it was the last with a 5x zoom (shorter zooms work better for digiscoping…longer zooms often do not work at all).

I was set up on this pair, photographing the courting behavior, when suddenly it went beyond courting. I was really too close to catch the full action, but zooming out on the camera give me dark edges in the images…so I got more of an intimate view than I might have chosen. Here you see that he has a grip on her breeding plume with his beak and is holding her so tightly that it has pulled the skin and feathers around to backside of her neck. This is the height of the action, but I have the whole sequence. I have made it into a slide show with music by Bughici (courtesy of the free music archive).

Digiscoping rig as above. About 1400mm equivalent. ISO 100 @ 1/50th. f5 effective, determined by the camera. Processed in Snapseed and Photo Editor by dev.macgyver on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.