March
3
Tuesday
1023
photos
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Today
I begin the second phase of my tour of Florida. Whereas the first
part of my trip was based in the Miami region, I’ve now moved on to my
hotel in Naples, which provides closer access to some of the birding
sites in the southernmost portion of Florida’s west coast. I
decided to begin with Tigertail Beach
on Marco Island, just a few miles
down the road from Naples. I found out about Tigertail from a
$50 site guide that I bought from a prominent bird photographer.
Tigertail offers access to a lagoon much like the one at Little Estero,
which I’ll be visiting in a few days. Finding Tigertail is easy:
take the main road to Marco Island (rt. 951) and then turn right on
Kendall and left on Hernando. The road ends at the park.
It’s a gated park, though if you arrive before the park ranger does,
the gate should be open. The problem with that is that you then
need to return to your car to pay the parking fee, which is $8.
There’s a sign that says "No Dogs", though I got in with my dog (who
stayed in the car) because I arrived early.
The main attraction at Tigertail is the ability to get close-up,
eye-level shots with blurred foregrounds and backgrounds:
White Ibis at
Tigertail Beach, on Marco Island.
Canon 600mm lens + 1.4x teleconverter, 840mm at f/8.
1/500 sec, set manually, at ISO 100. No flash.
Around low tide the water level is very low, so that you can easily
wade across the lagoon, though in order to get eye-level shots like the
one shown above, you need to get down on your belly, and that means
positioning yourself at the edge of the water, in the mud. I use
a large piece of plastic sheeting from Home Depot to lie on so that I
don’t get all wet and
muddy. The frying pan I mentioned earlier is useful here too, for
sliding your lens around in the sand/mud.
One important piece of advice is in order here: if you use a tarp to
keep from getting wet, make sure you look up often from your viewfinder
to check the level of the water around you. As the tide
imperceptibly comes back in, the shoreline can silently creep up and
around you, and in the excitement of shooting birds at close range you
can fail to realize (till it’s too late) that you’re getting
soaked. This happened to me at Tigertail (and elsewhere), ruining
my $400 iPhone that I had foolishly left in the pocket of my
sweatpants. I now keep all memory cards and other water-sensitive
items in sealed plastic bags in my vest pockets. Later on this
trip I’ll
watch as another photographer ruins his teleconverter the same way.
One interesting behavioral pattern that I noticed first at Tigertail
and then again later at Little Estero was that the Snowy Egrets would
follow around the White Ibises while the latter foraged in semi-deep
water. The ibises have much longer beaks than the snowies, so in
deeper water the ibis can reach the bottom without submerging its face,
whereas the snowy can’t:
White Ibis and
Snowy Egret at Tigertail Beach.
Canon 600mm lens
+ 1.4x teleconverter, 840mm at f/8.
1/500 sec, set manually, at ISO 100. Fill flash on full power.
Though I did
occasionally see an ibis chase off a shadowing snowy, they mostly
seemed to tolerate them, so I’m guessing that the snowy’s intention is
not so much to steal whatever morsels the ibis brings up in its own
beak, but more just to grab anything stirred up to the surface by the
ibis’ prodding movements in the bottom mud.
As ou can see in the photo below, the ibises often go all the way up to
the eyeballs when foraging in really deap water (I’ve also seen them
occasionally submerge the entire head):
White Ibis at
Tigertail Beach.
Canon 600mm lens
+ 1.4x teleconverter, 840mm at f/8.
1/800 sec, set manually, at ISO 100. No flash.
What left me somewhat unimpressed by Tigertail was the relatively
monotonous range of backgrounds available at the site. I didn’t
explore the whole lagoon, but in the parts that I did explore, the
backgrounds all seemed the be largely the same. The Little Blue
Heron image below shows one counter-example —
for this image I was
able to get quite a nice range of colors into the background:
Little Blue Heron
at Tigertail Beach.
Canon 600mm lens
+ 1.4x teleconverter, 840mm at f/5.6.
1/800 sec, set manually, at ISO 250. Fill flash on full power.
The variety of birds present at Tigertail that day also failed to
impress me. In addition to the tri-colored and little-blue
herons, the snowy egrets, white ibises, and several brown pelicans,
there were a few "peeps" — tiny,
sanderling-like shorebirds that I’m
too lazy to look up in my field guide:
"Peep" at
Tigertail Beach.
840mm at f/13. 1/200 sec at ISO 100.
Fill flash at full power.
The one good thing about Tigertail is that there
weren’t many people there, at least not during my visit. That may
be due to the $8 parking fee.
While at Tigertail I got a tip from a
birder there about some Burrowing Owl nests
nearby, on Marco Island (same island as Tigertail). Though I had
planned to shoot the Burrowing Owls at Cape Coral, further to the
north, I saw no harm in trying these nearer nests. To get to the
nests from Tigertail, you take rt. 951 south, turn left onto San Marco,
and
then right onto Lamplighter. The nests are easy to see.
They’re the tiny, roped-off areas that you will occasionally find on
unoccupied lots in many Forida housing developments. Next to the
nest hole there’s usually an artificial perch installed by some
monitoring agency. In the case of the Lamplighter colony, I saw
about 10 nests, but didn’t actually see any owls. Right now
they’re probably in the incubation phase. During this time, it’s
somewhat rare to see them at the entrance to the nest hole during
mid-day.
I next decided to try Corkscrew Swamp, which also was close by (just a
few exits north of Naples). The sanctuary is reached by taking
rt. 75 north to Imokalee Road and then following the signs. The
parking lot was enormous, and was nearly filled with cars.
Corkscrew is very popular
among tourists!
The sanctuary has a several-mile-long boardwalk that winds through the
swamp. I found most of it to be utterly useless for my
purposes. Only a very tiny portion of the swamp actually had any
water in it, and this was where all the birds were. Unless you
happen to go during a wetter season, I’d recommend following the
"shortcut" signs for the "lettuce ponds" rather than walking the entire
boardwalk with a bunch of heavy equipment. Wildlife can be seen
along the rest of the boardwalk —
warblers high in the trees, deer
off in the distance, and reportedly panthers in the dead of night —
but
I only had a few hours to spend here, so I stayed at the lettuce
ponds. I got only a tiny handful of barely usable images even
there.
I was very excited, however, to see my very first Swallow-tailed Kite:
Swallow-tailed
Kite at Corkscrew Swamp.
600mm at
f/7.1, hand-held overhead (straight up).
1/640 sec at ISO 320.
I’d never seen this species before. I
actually saw a pair of them mating in a tree across the swamp, but
couldn’t get any photos, till one soared high overhead, resulting in
the image above. That was exciting. So exciting that I
didn't even mind hand-holding the huge 600m lens for the straight-up
overhead shot.
The other raptor I saw that day was this immature Red-shouldered Hawk
that appeared to be foraging for small prey (perhaps insects and the
like) close to the boardwalk near the lettuce ponds:
Red-shouldered
Hawk at Corkscrew Swamp.
600mm at f/9. 1/160 sec at ISO 250.
Fill flash at full power.
One nice bird to find at Corkscrew is the Yellow-crowned Night
Heron. There are quite a lot of them there. Unfortunately,
because the swamp is full of dense foliage and because visitors are
restricted to the boardwalk, it can be difficult to get photos of birds
with nice backgrounds. For the night heron shown below, I used
the "Levels" tool in Photoshop to blacken the background completely
(the bird was lit by heavy flash):
Yellow-crowned
Night Heron at Corkscrew Swamp.
600mm at f/7.1. 1/320 sec at ISO 500.
Fill flash on full power.
Other birds
seen at Corkscrew included Great Egrets, Little Blue Herons, Green
Herons, and White Ibises. There are also gators, so stay out of
the water...
I encountered very few serious photographers at
Corkscrew (though it’s possible there may have been more in the
morning). Two nice ladies that I met told me about two sites near
the Venice Rookery that I should definitely visit: the "dump" (actually
a recycling plant) and the "celery fields". These ladies also
confirmed that Sanibel is very poor for bird photography right
now. I should note that the park rangers at Corkscrew are extremely helpful —
they actually post little signs on the boardwalk that they update
throughout the day, telling you that there’s
a such-and-such (type of bird or other animal) that was just sighted
here.
Overall, I’d recommend leaving Corkscrew as a
last option for those planning to visit this part of
Florida. Though admittance is free and there is a nice
visitors’ center, pets are not allowed on the boardwalk, the boardwalk
can get very crowded with tourists, and getting great bird photos can
take quite a lot of patience and time, which unfortunately, I don’t
have.
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