Preening Ruffled Feathers

Ruffled Feathers
Originally uploaded by eclectic echoes.

How about few more shorebird pictures…

Yesterday I had a dental appointment in Waterford, CT but I also had a new lens I was really excited to test out, so I took the camera with me. After the appointment I headed towards the coast and discovered a state propert known as “The Seashore Center.” It looks like it was once a school or some such, but now it is run down and looks abandoned. There is no vehicular traffic allowed, but pedestrians are welcome. The shore is only about 1/2 mile from the entrance.

I took tripod and gear down to the sandy beach and was greated by a dozen or more cormorants, a handful of gulls and a few common terns. One of the terns eventually landed on some pilings set out from the beach a ways. The cormorants took up the remaining pilings as well as the stone jetty. I enjoyed watching the terns much further up the beach diving for fish from 20 to 30+ feet up, straight down and in. When this common tern finally came back to one of the pilings it fluffed it feathers and posed for me for a while. It also started calling, turning every o often to begin calling out to a different quarter.

Preening Time
Originally uploaded by eclectic echoes.

Just as I was about to leave the beach, this Great Egret swooped onto a piling. Balancing on one leg it began preening it beautiful feathers. I quickly lowered one leg of my just put away tripod and used it as a monopod to get a few good pictures.
This was the first egret I saw that landed anywhere nearby. During the hour I spent on the beach I had seen a number of them flying up and down the coast, so I was very excited to have this one stop right in front of me, especially with the new lens combination so I could get right up close to him. Just a quickly as he arrived, he launched himself into the air and flew off down the coast.

Unfortunately I discovered when I got home that I had had the ISO set to 1600 the whole time! Fortunately I shot entirely in RAW mode and was able to remove the more offensive ISO noise at the expense of a little image softening. A hard learned lesson to be sure.