March
4
Wednesday
2130
photos
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This
morning I drove straight from my hotel in Naples to Fort Myers
Beach. Behind the hotels and resorts lining rt. 41 is a little
lagoon hidden
away from the heavy traffic of this insanely popular tourist
destination. The site, called Little
Estero Lagoon, was
popularized by respected bird photographer Arthur Morris and others, and is
now common knowledge to
birders and bird photographers in Florida.
Tidepool at
Little Estero Lagoon.
70mm at f/9. 1/800 sec at ISO 320.
Fill flash on high-speed sync at -1/3.
Actually getting to the sanctuary is a bit of a pain. All along
the "strip" are hotels that forbid parking by non-guests, and many even
forbid the public to use their beach access trails to get to the bird
sanctuary. The Holiday Inn forbids parking, but I saw no signs
forbidding pedestrian traffic. I parked in the lot across the
street at
the CVS and then walked through the Holiday Inn parking lot to the
lagoon in back. To get to where the birds were congregating, I
then had to turn left and walk a hundred yards or more to the sandy
beach where birds were foraging in several shallow tidepools.
There
are two wooden piers there by the pools, but they’re restricted to
hotel guests (and they’re useless at low tide, anyway).
I spent virtually all of my time at Little Estero lying on my belly in
the sand
beside the shallow pools, shooting egrets, herons, and ibises at
eye-level. The tarp wasn’t necessary because there wasn’t any
mud, though the frying pan proved invaluable for sliding the big 600mm
lens around on the sandy beach as I repositioned to be closer to the
moving flock.
The birds here seem utterly fearless. One snowy egret pointedly
left the flock and walked right up to me while I was lying on my belly,
and stood no more than two feet away, just staring at me for the
longest time. I began to wonder if other photographers feeding
the birds bait fish might have conditioned them to approach
photographers in hopes of a hand-out (?). I soon learned that
there’s a bait shop right across the street (Fish Tails, or Fish Tales —
I don’t remember which, but it’s behind the boat rental place),
though it doesn’t open till about 8am, which is later than I’d like to
wait in the morning before hitting the beach.
In any event, head hots and frame-filling portraits are a snap at this
site, as was patiently illustrated by this very cooperative Little Blue
Heron:
Little Blue Heron
at Little Estero Lagoon.
600mm at f/9. 1/320 sec at ISO 100.
Fill flash at full power (+3).
Here’s a tri-colored heron with a somewhat more striking plumage than
I’ve yet seen in this species:
Tri-colored Heron
at Little Estero Lagoon.
400mm at f/9. 1/1600 sec at ISO 320.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
Unfortunately, I’m finding that these eye-level, static portrait shots
are starting to become a bit boring, since they’re all starting to look
the same. The on-your-belly perspective is definitely nicer (for
shorebirds and water birds) than the looking-down-from-the-tripod
perspective, but once you’ve taken enough eye-level shots of static
birds you
start to want something more.
So I started actively trying to
capture interesting poses or interesting behaviors rather than simple
static portrait shots. The easiest of these are the prey-capture
shots, showing the bird during or just after capture of its prey.
The first photo below is of a plover with an impossibly large (and
admittedly not-very-photogenic) worm or pupa, which the bird then
proceeded to
dismember and quickly swallow. As you can see from the photo,
although the bird was perfectly still during the shot, my shutter speed
was too slow to freeze the wiggling motions of the prey:
Plover at Little
Estero Lagoon.
600mm at f/9. 1/250 sec at ISO 100.
Fill flash at full power (+3).
The bird below was captured in the act of pulling up a
(much smaller) worm from the sandy mix at the edge of the pond.
Notice how, despite my having stopped down the lens from f/4 all the way to f/9 (2.3 stops), the depth-of-field
is still very shallow, with only a very narrow strip of water being in
focus. This is due to the extreme closeness of the bird —
remember that depth-of-field increases with distance, so for extremely
close subjects, a much smaller aperture can be used while still keeping
the background blurred, and will help with making sure that no critical
parts of
the subject are out of focus:
Plover at Little
Estero Lagoon.
600mm at
f/9. 1/320 sec at ISO 100. No flash.
Static shots of a bird with its prey are the easiest,
because there is little chance of motion blur, and they can provide
much for the viewer to look at. Though the ibis photo below is a
static portrait shot, which many photographers would consider boring,
there is much for the viewer to contemplate, from the detail in the
bird’s plumage to the minute anatomy of the eye that can be seen, to
the minute wrinkles in the facial skin, and then finally to the color
patterning and scale patterns of the fish. The blurred, colorful,
two-toned background helps too:
White Ibis with
Fish.
400mm at f/9. 1/1600 sec at ISO 320.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
Although I’m always disappointed when I see motion blur in my images
(because it means that I was negligent in choosing a proper shutter
speed), a small amount of motion blur can actually enhance an image, in
some cases, by providing evidence of motion. In the snowy egret
photo below, the slight motion blur of the upper mandible of the bird’s
beak suggests a crunching motion as the bird tries to subdue its
freshly-caught shrimp prey:
Snowy Egret with
Shrimp.
400mm at f/9. 1/1600 sec at ISO 320.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
Another way to improve the potential for interesting
static portrait shots is by introducing props into the scene, as I
found out quite by accident at Little Estero, when I left my hat on the
beach. Within minutes, a plover separated from the flock to come
over and investigate:
Plover and Hat.
600mm at f/9. 1/1250 sec at ISO 320.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
One idea for a rather less artificial
prop, which I didn’t get a chance to try, is a pile of driftwood.
Driftwood should be readily available in places like this, wouldn’t
take to long to collect, and would help to break up the monotony of the
flat sandscapes that served as the substrate for most of the scenes
which I captured at this site.
The best alternative to static portrait shots is, of course, action
shots, which (unless you like dealing with high-ISO noise or very
shallow depth-of-field) require lots of light in order to obtain at
least moderately high shutter speeds. Fortunately, Florida tends
to be a very sunny place, so as long as you can position yourself
between the sun and the birds, action shots become very feasible —
as
long as there’s some action to capture. Most of the time the
birds at Little Estero moved about slowly, foraging in the shallow
water, but occasionally disagreements broke out. The most common
disagreement was over food ownership, as you can see from the series
of photos below. In the first image, a gull and a snowy egret
begin following a white ibis who has recently caught a fish and taken
it up onto the dry sand to eat it:
Ibis, Gull, and
Snowy Egret at Little Estero Lagoon.
400mm at f/9. 1/1250 sec at ISO 320.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
Below you can see that the gull and
snowy egret continue to follow the
ibis, while a great egret has now joined in the procession, and the
ibis has quickened its pace, as the threat level has continued to
escalate:
Gull, Egrets, and
Ibis at Little Estero Lagoon.
400mm at f/9. 1/1250 sec at ISO 320. No flash.
Chases involving ibises with fish proved to be fairly common at Little
Estero. Below is another shot showing a snowy and a white
ibis. I should note that I again observed the
snowy-shadowing-ibis behavior that I first noticed at Tigertail Beach
on Marco Island several days ago, in which a snowy egret would shadow
an ibis in somewhat deeper water, where the ibis’ longer beak gave it
an advantage over the shorter-beaked egret.
Snowy Egret
Shadowing White Ibis.
400mm at f/9. 1/1600 sec at ISO 320.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
My favorite action shots from Little Estero were those showing both
prey items and action. In the image below, you can see that I was
lucky enough to capture the bird with outstretched wings and
outstretched feet during a landing, with only slight motion blur in one
wingtip. Also notice the water droplets coming off of the fish,
which itself is in motion as it tries to wiggle free of the bird’s
grasp:
White Ibis with
Fish.
400mm at f/9. 1/1600 sec at ISO 320.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
All-in-all,
I was pleased with Little Estero, but not overwhelmingly impressed with
the opportunities evident there that day. The backgrounds weren’t
at all diverse, there were lots of people (including a few that ignored
the NO DOGS signs and scared off many of the birds), and the species
diversity was poor. Though I had been hoping to see some Roseate
Spoonbills or Reddish Egrets, I had to make do with what was basically
the same species assemblage that I encounter much closer to home in the
Carolinas. Nevertheless, the ability to get close shots of birds
with such timeless beauty as the Great Egret made it difficult for me
to grumble:
Great Egret at
Little Estero Lagoon.
400mm at f/9. 1/1600 sec at ISO 320. No flash.
I should note that sites like Little Estero can change from year to
year as storms move sand bars around and open up or close channels
connecting parts of the lagoon to the open ocean. In years when
the lagoon has little or no connectivity with the ocean, two things can
happen: (1) the water can stay deep even at low tide, preventing mud
flats from appearing, and (2) the fish in the lagoon can get depleted,
since few or no fish are able to wander into the lagoon at high
tide. Both are bad for birding. This year the lagoon
appears largely cut off from the ocean, with only a few tidepools near
the
lagoon getting re-stocked with fish each high-tide and therefore
offering dimished attraction for the birds.
At noon I decided to move on to the next site. Though a fellow
photographer gave me a tip about some low osprey nests just down the
road at Lovers’ Key, I decided instead to take my dog swimming at the
dog park down the road and then to head up to Cape Coral in seach of
Burrowing Owls and Bald Eagles. Cape Coral is just a short drive
north of Fort Myers, and is reputed to have a very large number of
resident Burrowing Owls. I got a tip from a Florida birder about
some of the more promising locations in Cape Coral for the owls, which
include the library off of Mohawk Parkway, the new city hall on
Cultural Park Blvd., and the BMX park off of Skyline Blvd.
I first tried the library, but wasn’t able to actually see any owls,
though I found plenty of owl nests. The owls are apparently
difficult to see at mid-day during the incubation period, with chances
for sightings being much better an hour or so before dark. Also,
not all nest holes are used every year. I
decided to head to the BMX park, where there were supposed to be not
only active owl nests, but also an active eagle nest.
The eagle nest was very easy to find —
there were signs along the
streets bordering the park indicating that I was entering a sensitive
eagle nesting area. Once you enter that area, if you just look up
in all the trees bordering the park you can’t miss the eagle
nest. There are signs posted along the closest street to the nest
forbidding parking along that street and forbidding tresspassing in the
field where the nest is located. However, it’s easy enough to
just park around the corner and walk up to the edge of the field, where
a spotting scope or moderately powerful lens (500mm+) are adequate to
capture detailed views of the nest and its occupants. A bird
appeared to be incubating in the nest during my visit. As I was
attaching a 2x teleconverter to my 600mm lens, I just happened to look
up and was surprised to see an eagle perched right above me, in a tree
not 15 yards away:
Bald Eagle at BMX
Park in Cape Coral.
1200mm at f/11. 1/400 sec at ISO 500. No flash.
The eagle seemed completely unconcerned by my presence, and proceeded
to nap while I watched from nearby.
The owl nests at the BMX park were no more productive (for me) than
those at the library, so I headed for city hall. Along the way I
stopped at another site near a church (near SE 5th Pl.) where there
were supposed to be active owl nests, and here I finally got lucky,
though that’s probably because the afternoon had worn on and it was now
only an hour or two before dark —
precisely when the birds are,
reportedly, more active above-ground. You can see from the photo
below that the late afternoon sunlight provided some nice, warm colors
for the out-of-focus areas:
Burrowing Owl in
Cape Coral.
840mm at f/9. 1/500 sec at ISO 1250. No flash.
This nest was off Nicholas Road, about a block or two from city
hall. The owls were very approachable, though I chose to be extra
cautious, by moving extremely slowly and by staying on my belly, moving
inch-by-inch through the tall grass, sliding my big lens along with the
help of the $7 frying pan. Once I had gotten close enough, it was
a
matter of waiting for the bird to do something interesting. The
best I was able to do that day was to get some shots of the bird
opening its beautiful yellow eyes wider. Though the bird below
appears alarmed, it wasn’t responding to my presence in this shot, but
rather to the approach of some noisy crows coming up behind me.
Note that this bird appears to be a juvenile; you can see that it has
much more white on the face than the adult shown above:
Burrowing Owl in
Cape Coral.
1200mm at f/9. 1/320 at ISO 800. No flash.
Unfortunately, all of the owl nest sites I visited lacked natural
perches, and were placed in flat, open, grassy lots with nothing but a
sea of grass to fill in the rest of the scene. The nesting sites
out in Davis, CA that I visited several years ago were much better in
this regard.
If you plan to visit Cape Coral to photograph the owls in spring, I’ve
been told that mid-March to mid-April is the best time, especially if
you’re interested in getting shots of the young ones emerging from the
nest.
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