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Friend or Foe?
A cottontail pauses from its grazing to figure out if I'm friend or foe. I was kneeling down to get to eye level with it, and given my distance thanks to the telephoto lens, it decided I wasn't a threat. Cottontails can be pretty tame in some areas but this one seemed pretty wary, perhaps having alligators nearby does that to you.
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Self Reflection
I took this picture a few days after my step-father's funeral. I arrived at dawn to find solace in the birds of the park. The tide was in but starting to recede, the heron a silent sentinel as the waters slowly drifted past. It wasn't in the mood to hunt, but did look down at something in the water for a moment. From my vantage point I could see nothing under the water, only the heron gazing intently on its own reflection.
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Green herons are one of my favorite herons, but I rarely get to see them — particularly up close. They’re much smaller than the great blue heron and can assume a variety of shapes, depending on how they are posing. I came across this heron early one morning in the freshwater marsh beside the causeway. Like the other wading birds that morning, it was hunting shrimp, using the downed tree as a base to strike out into the water. |
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Crab Breakfast
I walked out on the boardwalk in the saltwater marsh early one morning and came across this yellow-crowned night heron. I had never seen one up close before, much less on the hunt. It was snagging crab after crab in the mud while the tide was out. It had eaten so many little crabs that I was sure it was full, but it would then go and grab another and then another.
In this picture, it has snared a small crab with its beak and flipped it up to move it back into its mouth. |
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Environmental
The tide was high on this peaceful morning along the saltwater side of the causeway. I had walked out onto the raised walkway above the salt marsh and was struck by the beauty of the reeds and their reflections in the water, when I noticed a male hooded merganser and several females swimming in the distance.
I hoped in vain that the male would turn his head just a little, but it still ranks as one of my favorite environmental portraits to date. |
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It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature
I had never seen skimmers before finding a small group feeding in the freshwater marsh beside the causeway. In most birds, such a disparity between the length of the upper and lower bill would be a defect, but in skimmers it’s there by design.
Skimmers feed by flying just above the water and skimming the surface with their bills. As the skimmers were feeding that day, you could see little fish jump out of the water to evade the hungry birds. |
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Long Legs
While many shorebirds have rather drab coloring, the black-necked stilt's really stands out. The high contrast black-and-white coloring really catches the eye, topped off with the almost comically long pink legs.
I came across this one feeding in the shallows of the freshwater marsh. The sun was about to rise but hadn't yet reached the marsh, so the light was low and the shutter speeds slow. The stilt was actively feeding so it was rapidly moving around, and there wasn't time to setup the tripod, leaving me with almost no sharp photos. Fortunately this one came out acceptably sharp as it uses its beak to grab its prey below the surface. |