My visit to Galveston Island State Park on Friday morning provided an opportunity to practice catching Common Terns in flight. There was a long boardwalk across one of the channels and the Terns were hunting on either side, often quite close to where I stood. They hover, which makes them easier than most birds to catch…but they also dive out of their hover to take fish. I only caught the dive twice in a half hour of shooting.

This is a crop from a 600mm equivalent shot. I was using my personal flight shot program on the Olympus OM-D E-M10. ISO 200 @ 1/640th @ f10. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet.

And for the Sunday Thought: Terns are among the most graceful of flyers…quick, agile…with long flexible wings, and lovely tail extensions on either side. Watching them always fills me with a mix of awe and joy…an almost giddy feeling of happiness. I got my first really good flight shots on Friday, and was able to closely study the way the wings cup the wind as they hover, how they use those tail extensions in flight, and how it is all in service of the hunt…how intent they are on the fish below, and how effortlessly they manoeuver in the air. They are incredibly focused creatures…and that is, I think, a large part of what gives them their grace. When they are in the air, everything in them flows in a single direction…to a single goal, and the goal pulls feather and muscle into forms of elegance.

Wouldn’t we all be better off if we could say the same of ourselves? If our lives lack grace and elegance, is it not because we always pulled in too many directions at once. We are anything but focused. When we meet someone who is as simply focused as a Tern in flight, and that is very rare, we immediately recognize the grace that fills their lives…and it fills us (or at least me) with that same giddy happiness to see them. If they are focused on God and the spirit, it is easy, and right, to call them saints. But, in my experience, even if the focus that collects them and gives them grace is in art, or music, or social justice, or simplicity, or simply love in its best sense…they seem to me to all be, at their hearts, a focus on the one creative spirit that animates us all.

And I have to say, it is certainly my aspiration to someday live a life as focused as a Tern in flight…and as filled with grace.