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Florida Safari 2009
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March 9
Monday
2215 photos
Like Sanibel, Fort Desoto Park is on an island, and took quite a bit of driving to get to from my hotel, though unlike Sanibel, there was absolutely no traffic.  The park is even shaped somewhat like Sanibel, with a main road extending the length of the V-shaped island.  I was told that the best birding was in the lagoon at the northwest corner of the park, so that’s where I headed.

On my way out of the enormous parking lot I encountered the accipiter (probably a Cooper’s Hawk) shown below.  The bird was completely backlit, and somehow I just couldn’t find the right settings quickly enough to illuminate the bird with flash (the bird flew off pretty quickly after I started shooting it).  I was able to fake the flash in Photoshop, however, by significantly lightening the underside of the bird with the Levels tool:



Cooper's Hawk at Fort Desoto Park.
840mm at f/7.1.  1/320 sec at ISO 640.
No flash.


Actually getting out to the lagoon required some wading (though I later found a footbridge a bit further down the beach).  I had arrived right around low tide, and soon the tide was coming back in.  Before me was a very, very large, shallow lagoon surrounded by sandy beach.  I had read that most days of the year you can find something here to shoot, and that during March the lagoon is typically jam-packed with shorebirds.  It appeared empty to me.

Off in the distance were some severely back-lit birds that looked like Willets.  I started to get worried.  I was soon delighted, however, to find this single Yellow-crowned Night Heron actively foraging in the shallows not far from me:



Yellow-crowned Night Heron at Fort Desoto.
600mm at f/10.  1/500 sec at ISO 320.
No flash.


The lagoon there was quite wide, so I was getting sky reflection in the water, but it was a fairly nice, deep blue, so I was happy.  The night heron didn’t stay long.  Soon, a side-arm of the lagoon began to fill with water, and then a tri-colored heron arrived.  I love these birds.  They always put on a show they’re one of the most animated herons when they forage.  This fellow pretty much just stood there perfectly still.  Because I was now shooting in a smaller arm of the lagoon, I at least had some color in the background to work with:



Tri-colored Heron at Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/7.1.  1/640 sec at ISO 200.
No flash.


Soon a Little Blue Heron showed up to forage alongside the tri-colored.  I’ve always considered this species to be a drab bird that’s difficult to expose well, since the reddish-violet on the neck and the bluish body are sometimes hard to see well without good lighting.  With this individual I was lucky to have front lighting from the sun and strong fill flash, so I was able to get a fair amount of detail with few shadow areas, though with all that light the color difference between neck and torso got a bit bleached out.  Notice the nictitating membrane closing over the eye:


Little Blue Heron at Fort Desoto.
600mm at f/13.  1/250 sec at ISO 160.
Fill flash at full power (+3).


In the image below you can see the color difference between neck and body better, though even with flash I wasn’t able to fill in all the shadows, due to the strong sunlight coming from above, which limited my exposure values due to the gray-white on the face:



Little Blue Heron at Fort Desoto.
600mm at f/13.  1/250 sec at ISO 160.
Fill flash at full power (+3).

Once I had shot several hundred frames of the herons I decided to continue my exploration of this site.  I soon found myself at the edge of the ocean and headed southeast along the beach.  After walking about a hundred yards or so I found another lagoon off to my left, though it appeared devoid of birdlife.  Out on the beach I found a flock of what appeared to be a variety of different species of terns.  I decided to try my luck with these.

Here again my $7 frying pan from WalMart proved invaluable, as I slid on my belly with the big 600mm rig, approaching the flock very slowly over the wet sand.  Though some of the birds bathed in the shallows, most of them stood around idly or napped, and I didn’t get many interesting shots.  I caught this bird in flight as it was returning from having taken a bath in the shallows:



Tern at Fort Desoto.
600mm at f/11.  1/500 sec at ISO 200.
No flash.


Though gulls rarely grab my attention, I liked the red beak and inner mouth parts of the Laughing Gulls, and was glad to get the image below of a Laughing Gull in the act of laughing.  Notice the very shallow depth-of-field produced by f/7.1 at very close range; only a very narrow strip of sand is in focus, and even the tiny rocks just inches behind the bird are out of focus:

 

Laughing Gull at Fort Desoto Park.
840mm at f/7.1.  1/2000 sec at ISO 320.
No flash.


Just about the only other bird I could find out on the beach was a Willet.  I like willets, though they’re usually a bird-of-last-resort for me, since they’re so common and aren’t terribly colorful.  In this case, I was very pleased with the resulting image.  The shallow DOF at f/7.1 makes the beach look like it extends out to infinity, and once again I was impressed by the clear blue of the Florida sky:



Willet at Fort Desoto.
600mm at f/7.1.  1/800 sec at ISO 320.
No flash.


I was rather more excited when I spied a group of three mergansers out in the ocean.  Since I was already on my belly I tried getting an eye-level shot of the bird out on the water, though that proved difficult, due to the rising and falling of the waves between me and the bird.  Eventually, by waiting for the bird to crest a wave, I was able to get a clear shot.  I was delighted to see that there was only one wave visible in frame, so that the water meets the sky right where the bird was sitting:



Merganser at Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/7.1.  1/500 sec at ISO 200.
Flash on high-speed sync at +0.

With so little activity out on the beach I decided to head back to the first lagoon to see if any other birds had shown up.  At first there appeared to be just one
what appeared to be a Little Blue Heron in back-lighting.  I was in no rush to shoot more of that bird.  My vision isn’t very good, though, and I soon became very excited when a passing birder informed me that the bird in the distance was actually a Reddish Egret.  Wow!

I headed on over to where the bird was foraging, got down on my plastic sheeting, set up my 600m lens on the frying pan, and frantically shot the bird, despite the terrible, near-noon lighting.  It’s interesting to note in the image below that much of the "fill" lighting on the undersides of the bird
s wings is actually sunlight reflecting off the water:



Reddish Egret at Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/6.3.  1/640 sec at ISO 320.
No flash.


Reddish egrets are like Tri-colored Herons in that they tend to strike many more interesting poses than some of the other herons and egrets.  Occasionally the birds "shake out" their feathers, producing something like a "spike" haircut:



Reddish Egret at Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/6.3.  1/640 sec at ISO 320.
No flash.


Unfortunately, though I shot many frames of this bird, I was happy with very few of them, due to the harsh mid-day sun, which seemed to bleach the color out of the bird’s reddish neck feathers.  I would end up returning to this site tomorrow specifically in hopes of getting more shots of this bird.

Around noon I took my dog to the "dog beach".  This is a beach right in Fort Desoto park where dogs are allowed to swim in the water, off-leash.  She loved it.  There were many, many dogs and dog-owners there, and all were having a great time.  Since I had been fairly disappointed in the birding at Fort Desoto so far, I decided to just spend some time with my dog.  She had sat patiently in the car for countless hours while I birded the Everglades, Key Largo, Corkscrew, Estero, Tigertail, Venice, and now Fort Desoto.  She deserved to have some fun.

In the late afternoon I grabbed my gear and ventured back out to the lagoon in the northwest corner of the park.  There were plenty of people (sunbathers and the like), but very, very few birds.  In the second, further lagoon, however, I was overjoyed to find a pair of Oystercatchers foraging in the shallow water as the sun fell toward the horizon behind me:


Oystercatcher at Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/7.1.  1/250 sec at ISO 100.
No flash.


In the image below I was able to get some golden reflections from the high, sandy bank in the near distance at the further edge of the pool:


Oystercatcher at Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/6.3.  1/640 sec at ISO 250.
No flash.


Not only did the birds tolerage my slow, on-my-belly-with-the-frying-pan approach, but eventually one even emerged from the water to pose on the dry sand directly in front of me:



Oystercatcher at Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/6.3.  1/640 sec at ISO 250.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).


As you can see above, the bird was vocalizing at the time.  I’ve often "conversed" with my pet birds by whisting their calls back at them, and for some stupid reason I decided to try whistling this bird’s call back at him
just for fun.  I have no idea what the translation was in bird-language, but apparently he found it highly offensive, because the pair immediately flew off.  Next time I’ll keep my mouth shut and stick to operating the camera.

Soon the sun was setting out over the ocean, and though I spied a large-ish group of photographers heading back to the parking lot, I decided to try for some silhouettes.  I was glad I did:



Willet (?) at Fort Desoto Park.
600mm at f/4.  1/400 sec at ISO 1250.
No flash.


Once again I found myself somewhat disappointed by a well-known birding location that I had been expecting would be excellent.  Earlier in the day a photographer had come up to me and said "Where are all the birds?  There are usually TONS of birds here..."  Right around that time some surfer dudes showed up and started "surfing" across the shallow ponds in the lagoon, scaring off the last bird in sight.  I’m pretty sure I saw more people than birds at Fort Desoto that day. 








All text and photos (C) Bill Majoros.  All rights reserved.