Thursday, October 9, 2008
Juvenile
Originally uploaded by eclectic echoes.
This juvenile common tern reminded e of air more that any other picture I have taken recently. I really enjoy photographing birds in flight though it more often than not result in less than optimum photos. A skill I really need to work on more.
Among my favorites to photograph are swallows and terns. These are the acrobats, the sleek highly maneuverable species which remind me of the Thunderbirds flying precision high G passes. This juvenile tern for example is still being fed by the adults, but here it is carving a path through the air, twisting and turning with great control. Later in the same session I watched one of the adults approach and hand off a herring to the juvenile smoothly without landing. It hovered for a minute as it put the fish in the juveniles mouth then took of again like a rocket.
Watching a tern fish, alternately scouting, hovering and diving head first into the water is a great way to pass an hour or even two.
Classification
- Kingdom
- Animalia
- Phylum
- Chordata
- Class
- Aves
- Order
- Charadriiformes
- Family
- Sternidae
- Genus
- Sterna
- Species
- Sterna hirundo
Life Photo Meme,
Saturday, August 20, 2005
A juvenile common tern coming in for a landing on a small rock in the sound, forcing the adult that was occupying the rock off to find a new place to perch.
I spent an hour or so on one of the beaches down in Waterford the other day (the same place and day that the Mystic Whaler shot was taken). I just watched the sound and the shore birds along some of the rocks and jetties. The funny thing about many of these birds is that they see a place where another bird is “perched” and decide that it’s a nice spot to stop. Not that the rock itself is a nice spot – whether the rock is 20 square feet or a half a square foot – no, they decide to land in the exact couple of inches as one of the other birds.
The rock in this photo also was the site of this type of musical chairs game. Over the course of the hour I was there it must have been the temporary perch to at least 30 birds. Some left of their own accord to fly further down the beach, but most, like the adult in the photo, were “pushed” off by another bird landing. I watched cormarants, gulls and terns all displace each other, and even one female duck. It is often comical, especially if the “pushed off” one circles round and reclaims his spot. I watched one pair of cormorants (both juvenile double cresteds) play musical chairs like this with each other repeatedly on a piling in the Mystic estuary. They switched places about 10 times over the course of a 10-15 minute period.
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.
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.
