Eric - Captured in Pixels

Sanderling Bathing Sequence

Sunday, 29. November 2009, 04:23:57

First of all, I'd like to thank My Opera and the community for making me Member of the Week. This is really quite the honor! Thank you very much

_

I thought this was kind of interesting, a sanderling taking a bath. All the sand that gets in their feathers while they probe up and down the beach needs to get washed out somehow, and I guess splash'n around in the water is how to do it.

I think the pictures mostly speak for themselves, so I won't break up the sequence with any text.

And final bit of drying off.

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Herons and Great Egrets

Thursday, 26. November 2009, 04:39:35

Great Egret, Yellow-crowned Night Heron, Black-crowned Night-Heron, great blue heron

Something I've never really managed to up to this point is get a good picture of a heron. They've always been too far away to give anything more than a scenic shot with a heron in it. So I'm quite happy that the wading birds in Florida are much less shy than the ones around here.
Except for the Yellow-crowned Night Heron, which is rare visitor, all the species in this post can actually be found in Southern Ontario in the summer.

This first bird is a Black-crowned Night-Heron, which also happens to be my favorite heron.

Clicking on the thumbnails will enlarge them.

By August, the year's fledglings have already grown to their adult size, but they won't have their adult plumage till next year.

There were a lot of great egrets. However, most of them were on the side of roads, so not that many shots of them.

Yellow-crowned night-herons are the first herons in Florida this year. It was getting dark when I took these pictures, so as this is a night-heron, it was just beginning to hunt for fish.

Great blue herons seem to be the most common of any wading birds. This one was hanging around the hotel I stayed at while on the Gulf Coast. He mostly just stood around a waited for people to toss him food.

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A Mouth Full of Peanuts

Monday, 23. November 2009, 06:18:29

chipmunk

Four months ago, I told Darko that I would take a picture of what a chipmunk looks like with three or more peanuts in it's mouth. I did, and as you can tell by how green the grass is, quite a long time ago. this will probably be the last chipmunk pictures for a while, until they come out of hibernation next spring.

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Pelicans

Sunday, 22. November 2009, 04:31:37

Brown Pelican

In current news, I finally got my telephoto lens back from Canon!

They unstickyed the zoom ring and replaced the power diaphragm unit (aperture). So if I were to get some sunshine, I might be able to post something a bit more current for a change. Even if it is a mourning dove.

Here are some brown pelicans for now. I only wish I could have gotten a picture of one of them diving into the water while they were flying. Their dives looked something like that of WW2 dive bombers, except they didn't pull up.

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Boat-tailed Grackles

Thursday, 12. November 2009, 01:38:23

Boat-tailed Grackle

These grackles are very unlike the common grackle, in the way that the females are actually kind of pretty. The males still don't look that much different apart from the common grackles fact that they have brown eyes instead of yellow.

Here's a sequence of one eating a snail.

And later in the grass...

Two of the male. They were hiding in trees waiting for people to drop their food as they got it from the counter. The janitors usually beat them to it though.