The foot bridge is a crossing over a moat, into a kingdom of feathers at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. Keeper of the Gate - ©ingridtaylar In this regenerated, re-planted Bolsa Bay, bird calls and murmurs bubble up from the terns, Sanderlings, scoters, avocets, grebes, plovers, pelicans, sparrows, Willets and egrets who call this haven home. The marsh is barely shielded from Pacific Coast Highway, with just a parking lot and thicket separating refuge [...]
I'm shooting within a five-mile radius these days, trying to get my photographic fix as I'm on my way to or from something else ... on sunny days, interspersed with Seattle rain. Fortunately, within those five miles, there are three nesting Osprey couples, one Bald Eagle pair, many more Great Blue Herons in their rookery, and at least 300
So little time ... and so little sun ... but I grabbed some moments during Seattle's first crystal days to break in the new lens. It's four years in coming -- four years of anticipating -- four years of honing my skills on my trusty and tough 70-300mm (f4.0-5.6). Now, my E-3 and I venture into the wild with a bit more heft and a bit more sharpness, thanks to the Zuiko 50-200mm. It's a [...]
As little as I've been out in the field with my camera lately (relative to how it used to be), I've had a disproportionate number of firsts in terms of wildlife viewings. Some of it is my change of environment and the newness of Seattle and its wild offspring. And some of it is, well -- I've just never seen these things before. I always say that wildlife photography is like an ongoing field study, [...]
I've described terns, with their distinct calls, as aerial barflies with too much whiskey and smoke on the voice box. Each tern is raspy in its own way, and Caspian Terns have a sharp croak that pierces the air over my balcony. They're huddled on a warehouse rooftop one minute, hundreds of them, blurred by a rising heat that's thick as shower glass. Then they're jetting over the bridge like little blanched superheroes, [...]
When you first encounter terns, their mid-air, hairpin turns seem unpredictable and difficult to capture -- especially since these birds are quite small when you're thinking about filling the frame. [see full-size photo ...]
Take a look at this image of terns — not because it’s anything spectacular. In fact, those terns were but specks on my visual horizon, so this is a dramatic crop to show just one thing: the size differential between the Caspian Terns and the Forster’s Terns I wrote about in a previous post. The large birds with their black caps and thick orange bills are Caspian Terns. In the center of the [...]
Lame Byrds pun aside . . . Forster's Tern Nation in Alameda - Sterna forsteri Their gravelly call precedes them, these Forster's Terns (Sterna forsteri) with their fuzzy black berets and orange feet. They sound like aerial barflys with too much whiskey and smoke on the voice box. When it's a row of more than 50 terns -- alternately calling to each other and to the gulls that regularly interrupt their conga line -- it's [...]