This morning I woke earlier than usual and arrived at Fort Desoto shortly after dawn.  I went straight to what I call the “north beach”, which is at the northwest terminus of this V-shaped island.  The tide was very low, but there were virtually no birds—just a pair of killdeers that wouldn’t let me approach.  I saw a group of about 8 photographers walk out to the beach, but they came back to the lagoon right away.  The wind was howling and it was cold.  The killdeers soon left, so I sped over to the opposite side of the island, to a point I call the “east beach”.  There were a few birds (mostly ibises), but they were backlit. 
    So I returned to the north beach to try my luck with a kestrel that I had seen perched on a wire in the parking lot both yesterday and today.  Despite hanging out in a high-traffic area, the bird was not very tame, and though I took great pains to approach it slowly it wouldn’t let me get even remotely close (and keep in mind that “close” with my huge lens is really not that close at all).  The best I could do was to get this smallish image at 840mm (i.e., using my 600mm lens with a 1.4× teleconverter):


Next, I hit the north beach lagoon again and found that there were now a few birds: a tricolored heron, a great egret, and a few willet-sized birds in the shade that I couldn’t identify with the naked eye.  I shot the tricolored for a while and then the great egret, till both left.  I’d noticed that a northern harrier periodically passed through while hunting on the wing, but it never came close enough for a frame-filling shot.  As with the kestrel in the parking lot, the best I could do was to get a small image of the bird:


The only other shots from this session that I ended up keeping were of an ibis that foraged in the rising water of the lagoon as the tide came in:



By noon there was again nothing to shoot at the north lagoon, so I again sped over to the complete opposite end of the island (the “east beach”), where I found a sizable flock of shorebirds: royal terns, sanderlings, plovers, sandpipers, godwits, and a few turnstones.  Now the sun was higher and I found that if I lay down at the edge of the water the angle of light wasn’t too bad, despite some backlighting—i.e., I could light up the shadows with flash.  (Note that while I usually shoot at my camera’s sync speed of 1/300 sec when using flash, with shorebirds I’ve found that this is too slow.  That means turning on the high-speed sync, which I don’t like to do, because it drastically reduces flash output.) 
    One of the highlights of this session was finding a Wilson’s plover that caught and dismembered a small crab before swallowing it whole:


The series of photos below shows the bird capturing and processing its prey:

CLICK TO ZOOM

I stayed at the east beach for hours, gleefully shooting tiny shorebirds at eye level, and at point-blank range with the big 600mm lens (see below).  I also got soaked, and chilled to the bone, because I was lying on my belly at the edge of the water, on a cold day, on wet sand.  In early afternoon a reporter from a newspaper in St. Petersburg came by and saw me there rolling in the filthy, cold, wet sand with my huge lens and thought the scene ludicrous enough to be newsworthy.  He conducted a shouted interview with me from a distance of about 40 feet (I was on my belly surrounded by shorebirds, and he didn’t want to scare them by coming closer).  Here’s a snapshot of the photo from the article:


Around 2ish I decided to take a break and let Kelsey do some swimming at the dog park on Desoto.  After that I checked the north lagoon again, but it was still dead.  I returned to the east beach and found that the flock was somewhat diminished, and was now completely inactive.  One or two birds bathed in the water, but all the rest were napping.  It was cold and windy, and I was still soaked from laying in the wet sand earlier.  I decided to drive immediately to Orlando and get ready to hit Gatorland first thing tomorrow morning.