Category: Birds

I Blame You, Boolie

A bald eagle sits on a mound as the rain pours down at Rest Lake in Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge

This bald eagle seems to be looking accusingly at me as the rain pours down at Rest Lake in Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge. It was a cool and wet spring morning after a cool and wet (and occasionally snowy) winter. Fair enough, I do love the rain and get a little cranky when it’s been sunny too many days in a row (such as today, as we enter another heat wave in May. May! It’s still spring!).

This is another picture where I took 4K video at the same time and the video gives a different feel to the photo and the moment it freezes in time. You can really see the rain hitting the water (and hear it hitting the car) in the video, as well as the current pushing the water past the eagle’s feet. And perhaps most importantly you can see that the eagle almost never looks in my direction, it was much more concerned about what was happening in the marsh, which is as it should be.

But in the photo, it’s gaze is fixed on me forever.

Hunter in Green

A great blue heron hunts for voles in the rain in a sea of green grass at Ridgefield National Wildlife Refuge in Ridgefield, Washington on March 26, 2017. Original: _DSC2899.ARW

When I visited Ridgefield a week ago I decided to only shoot with the new Sony camera and the adapter that lets me attach my Canon telephotos. I was expecting to have to rely on manual focus but the autofocus did work sometimes, although not consistently enough for this to be a combination I’ll use often for photos. For these shots I used manual focus, although I was still learning how to do it. I’d normally like a little more depth of field in a shot like this, especially to keep more of the pouring rain in focus, but by shooting wide open I was able to take more of an abstract and turn the grass that surrounded the hunting heron into a sea of green.

With the heron standing tall, you get more of a sense of the large meadow it was hunting in. I had no idea herons hunted in meadows until I moved to the Northwest, but all the voles that live here are well aware.

I didn’t have time to take any 4K videos of this heron, it struck into the ground and walked off when it came up empty, but I did take a few videos of some animals sitting in the pouring rain, including a bald eagle, a white-tailed deer, and some snipe. I’ve never edited video but I’ll see if I can learn enough to put a few clips up in the next month or so.

📷: Sony A6500 | Canon 500mm | Canon 1.4X
🗓️: March 26, 2017

A great blue heron stands in a meadow in the pouring rain

Look Who I Found!

A close-up of an American bittern hunting in tall grasses

I visited Ridgefield a handful of times over the Christmas break and was saddened to see that my favorite spot to watch bitterns, a little strip along Rest Lake, had been mowed close to the ground. There is plenty of cover in other areas near this strip so the bitterns still have ample places to hunt, they just won’t be visible from the road. So I was ecstatic on my last visit, when I had stopped to watch some bufflehead in an earlier section of Rest Lake, to notice this bittern hunting in the tall grasses. I only had a little window through the grasses to see it but it was a real delight to watch one of my favorite birds again.