Most of the time, I aim to post “day of” on my birding outings. Having spent 32 years in daily journalism, I put a high value on keeping things current. This post, however, leads with a photo that I shot the day before.
On Thursday, I posted the hawk take-off sequence I shot at Veterans Park in Hamilton, which I felt needed to be featured by itself. I held back on a posting a couple of shots I took earlier in the morning at John A. Roebling Park in Abbott Marshlands.
This morning, Friday, I made three stops and shot only a few photos. While I had multiple shots worthy of sharing yesterday, today was the opposite, with only a single song sparrow in focus. My other shots were of great egrets and other birds too far off to feature or even save.
I thus am presenting two of the photos I got Thursday at Roebling Park. The lead image of a great blue heron looking for something to eat while standing in Spring Lake is, in my estimation, one of my best shots of the year.
When photographing birds, you most often need to aim and fire quickly before the birds fly off. With the heron, I wasn’t so close as to spook it. I had time to find an angle at which to show off best the reflection on the water of the fall foliage on the far side of the lake. I took a few shots and then waited for the bird to turn its head to the right, giving me an opportunity for a strong profile shot.
I love shooting in the fall because the changing leaves make for great backdrops, and the sunlight often comes from a lower angle than the high suns of summer. For the heron photo, I was lucky, too, in that I walked clockwise around the lake instead of my usual counterclockwise route. Had I gone the usual way, the lighting would have been different, the reflection less and the bird may have been elsewhere.
As I made my way around the lake, I came to the bridge that takes visitors to the back island at the park. I decided against going that way and instead went to an opening in the trees at the edge of the marsh.
Across the way I spotted a goose-sized bird with a white breast lurking in the reeds. Still fuzzy on duck field marks, I could not make an on-the-spot ID. Once I got the photos up on screen at home, I realized I’d found a Northern pintail, my first of the season. In its pose, it looks distinguished, does it not?
We’ll have a couple more weeks of fall color to enhance our enjoyment of the outdoors and the photos we take. While I hope for more days like yesterday when lots of fine photo opportunities presented themselves, I can still appreciate days like today when there wasn’t much to shoot. Feast or famine? Either way, it’s fun. 🦅