Eventually you’ll see some nice images from the Great Blue Heron rookery I visited this morning. Standing in a swamp for 2 hours helps one gain an immense appreciation for bug repellent! However, this post is about the topic “Never Stop Birding!” On the way home from the rookery, I needed to stop for gasoline. My fuel station of choice was the Kwik Trip on Rice Lake Road in Duluth. While pumping gas along with 20 of my closest friends, I heard a killdeer. Who cares that a highway ditch along a busy highway may not be my chosen birding location. Thankfully, I always have my super zoom camera in the car. I parked my car away from the pumps and proceeded to bird Kwik Trip.
This image resulted. The location looks like a meadow in the middle of nowhere, but looks are deceiving. I already gave you the location. Do you always have an ear tuned to bird song, and your brain always registering birds even when you are not birding? I do!
I was actually crawling around on the gas station’s lawn trying to take this photograph. I’m sure other patrons thought I was crazy, and could not figure what I thought was so interesting. My goal was to capture the lupine and the killdeer in the same photo. Crawling was required such that I would not scare the bird.
I visited two Osprey nests this morning. Both are occupied, but with no evidence yet of young. The chicks should hatch soon. At each nest I was treated to an osprey eating a mid morning fish … and much more. In birding, occasionally all the angles add up. Today was such a morning. Both the sun and wind were behind me. Assuming anything more than a breeze, raptors due to their size will never take off down wind. The first sequence of images are a take-off. While I knew said bird was eating, I had no idea the fish was almost whole, and firmly grasped in the Osprey’s talons.
A pause before the take-off photographs. Folks have heard me espouse about the importance in using burst or continuous mode for bird photography. These five images took place in less than 1/2 second. Using a single shot mode, I would have captured just that … a single photo, but which image would it have been? With the fish? Taking Off? Who knows? In addition, I had RAW turned off. This almost doubles my continuous mode to 14 frames per second. While I know some people like to take RAW images, the result of taking that approach would have meant I would have missed 1/2 the take-off photos (RAW is almost twice as slow). Finally, since this a short photography tutorial, I performed minor editing in Photoshop Elements: Opened JPG image in Camera RAW (this is not a RAW image), slid clarity +40, Black +70 and White +20. At that point I finished opening the image and adjusted Shadows +12 and Highlights +6. A minor crop was used to position the osprey in the image at the point desired. As a fyi, these are considered “minor edits” in the world of photography.
Canosia State Wildlife Refuge Osprey Take-Off (less than 1/2 second for the sequence of photos … for those of you who know Duluth, this is the “steam shovel nest” on Lavaque Road approximately 2 miles north of the Martin Road intersection)
I then moved on to a second nest. I struck pay dirt again! An Osprey busy eating a recent capture. As to not startle the bird, I took 10+ minutes to get in position. Shortly after getting to my desired photography location, I realized the Osprey was upset, but not at me. The bird kept looking up into the sky and issuing a challenge. It took me a while, and quite frankly I expected to spy a bald eagle, but I finally saw two additional ospreys high overhead. Their presence was NOT desired. It took me well over 15 seconds to spot these birds even though the Osprey knew of their presence immediately! In the four photos you can observe that the Osprey’s wings are ready for instant take-off should defense of the nest and his mate become necessary.
In my most recent post, I included links to the float plane videos. This will now be a new feature of each post that includes a movie. I learned by subscribing to my own blog that folks who receive blog post email updates were NOT seeing any embedded movies. Given many of you have missed my short movies, here is the page from my blog which lists most my videos.
In addition, my email subscribers did not see my forest fire video. Here is the movie I took on that scary evening just a few nights ago … right across from my house.
Finally, an update on my Great Horned Owl family. While the young have fledged, with the help of path finding crows and blue jays, I am able to find individual owls during most hikes. This morning was typical. I followed the confrontation between the owl and crows by ear for several miles through the forest, but when everyone flew across a deep ravine, I had to give up. Here are photographs taken shortly after sunrise a few mornings ago. It’s tough being a Great Horned Owl in the morning.
The last image shows why if one is willing to hike (often several miles off trail), I am able to find my owls. It is not unusual to have 20+ crows dive bombing the poor owl, and even landing just a few feet from an owl. However, before I show too much sympathy for my Great Horned Owls, understand that they are raiding a huge number of crow’s nest every night for a snack. The evidence was very much obvious around the old nesting site. There is no love lost between these two species of birds.
