March
9
Monday
2215
photos
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Like
Sanibel, Fort Desoto Park is on an island, and took quite a bit of
driving to get to from my hotel, though unlike Sanibel, there was
absolutely no traffic. The park is even shaped somewhat like
Sanibel, with a main road extending the length of the V-shaped
island. I was told that the best birding was in the lagoon at the
northwest corner of the park, so that’s where I headed.
On my way out of the enormous parking lot I encountered the accipiter
(probably a Cooper’s Hawk) shown below. The bird was completely
backlit, and somehow I just couldn’t find the right settings quickly
enough to illuminate the bird with flash (the bird flew off pretty
quickly after I started shooting it). I was able to fake the
flash in Photoshop, however, by significantly lightening the underside
of the bird with the Levels
tool:
Cooper's Hawk at
Fort Desoto Park.
840mm at f/7.1. 1/320 sec at ISO 640.
No flash.
Actually getting out to the lagoon
required some wading (though I later
found a footbridge a bit further down the beach). I had arrived
right around low tide, and soon the tide was coming back in.
Before me was a very, very large, shallow lagoon surrounded by sandy
beach. I had read that most days of the year you can find
something here to shoot, and that during March the lagoon is typically
jam-packed with shorebirds. It appeared empty to me.
Off in the distance were some severely back-lit birds that looked like
Willets. I started to get worried. I was soon delighted,
however, to find this single Yellow-crowned Night Heron actively
foraging in the shallows not far from me:
Yellow-crowned
Night Heron at Fort Desoto.
600mm at f/10. 1/500 sec at ISO 320.
No flash.
The lagoon there was quite wide, so I
was getting sky reflection in the water, but it was a fairly nice, deep
blue, so I was happy. The night heron didn’t stay long.
Soon, a side-arm of the lagoon began to fill with water, and then a
tri-colored heron arrived. I love these birds. They always
put on a show —
they’re one of the most animated herons when they
forage. This fellow pretty much just stood there perfectly
still. Because I was now shooting in a smaller arm of the lagoon,
I at least had some color in the background to work with:
Tri-colored Heron
at Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/7.1. 1/640 sec at ISO 200.
No flash.
Soon a Little Blue Heron showed up to forage alongside the
tri-colored. I’ve always considered this species to be a drab
bird that’s difficult to expose well, since the reddish-violet on the
neck and the bluish body are sometimes hard to see well without good
lighting. With this individual I was lucky to have front lighting
from the sun and strong fill flash, so I was able to get a fair amount
of detail with few shadow areas, though with all that light the color
difference between neck and torso got a bit bleached out. Notice
the nictitating membrane closing over the eye:
Little Blue Heron
at Fort Desoto.
600mm at f/13. 1/250 sec at ISO 160.
Fill flash at full power (+3).
In the image below you can see the color difference between neck and
body better, though even with flash I wasn’t able to fill in all the
shadows, due to the strong sunlight coming from above, which limited my
exposure values due to the gray-white on the face:
Little Blue Heron
at Fort Desoto.
600mm at f/13. 1/250 sec at ISO 160.
Fill flash at full power (+3).
Once I had
shot several hundred frames of the herons I decided to continue my
exploration of this site. I soon found myself at the edge of the
ocean and headed southeast along the beach. After walking about a
hundred yards or so I found another lagoon off to my left, though it
appeared devoid of birdlife. Out on the beach I found a flock of
what appeared to be a variety of different species of terns. I
decided to try my luck with these.
Here again my $7 frying pan from WalMart proved invaluable, as I slid
on my belly with the big 600mm rig, approaching the flock very slowly
over the wet sand. Though some of the birds bathed in the
shallows, most of them stood around idly or napped, and I didn’t get
many interesting shots. I caught this bird in flight as it was
returning from having taken a bath in the shallows:
Tern at Fort
Desoto.
600mm at f/11. 1/500 sec at ISO 200.
No flash.
Though gulls rarely grab my
attention, I liked the red beak and inner mouth parts of the Laughing
Gulls, and was glad to get the image below of a Laughing Gull in the
act of laughing. Notice the very shallow depth-of-field produced
by f/7.1 at very close range;
only a very narrow strip of sand is in focus, and even the tiny rocks
just inches behind the bird are out of focus:
Laughing Gull at
Fort Desoto Park.
840mm at f/7.1. 1/2000 sec at ISO 320.
No flash.
Just about
the only other bird I could find out on the beach was a Willet. I
like willets, though they’re usually a bird-of-last-resort for me,
since they’re so common and aren’t terribly colorful. In this
case, I was very pleased with the resulting image. The shallow
DOF at f/7.1 makes the beach
look like it extends out to infinity, and once again I was impressed by
the clear blue of the Florida sky:
Willet at Fort
Desoto.
600mm at f/7.1. 1/800 sec at ISO 320.
No flash.
I was rather more excited when I spied a group of three mergansers out
in the ocean. Since I was already on my belly I tried getting an
eye-level shot of the bird out on the water, though that proved
difficult, due to the rising and falling of the waves between me and
the bird. Eventually, by waiting for the bird to crest a wave, I
was able to get a clear shot. I was delighted to see that there
was only one wave visible in frame, so that the water meets the sky
right where the bird was sitting:
Merganser at Fort
Desoto.
840mm at f/7.1. 1/500 sec at ISO 200.
Flash on high-speed sync at +0.
With so little activity out on the beach I decided to head back to the
first lagoon to see if any other birds had shown up. At first
there appeared to be just one —
what appeared to be a Little Blue
Heron in back-lighting. I was in no rush to shoot more of that
bird. My vision isn’t very good, though, and I soon became very
excited when a passing birder informed me that the bird in the distance
was actually a Reddish Egret.
Wow!
I headed on over to where the bird was foraging, got down on my plastic
sheeting, set up my 600m lens on the frying pan, and frantically shot
the bird, despite the terrible, near-noon lighting. It’s
interesting to note in the image below that much of the "fill" lighting
on the undersides of the bird’s
wings is actually sunlight reflecting
off the water:
Reddish Egret at
Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/6.3. 1/640 sec at ISO 320.
No flash.
Reddish egrets are like Tri-colored
Herons in that they tend to strike many more interesting poses than
some of the other herons and egrets. Occasionally the birds
"shake out" their feathers, producing something like a "spike" haircut:
Reddish Egret at
Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/6.3. 1/640 sec at ISO 320.
No flash.
Unfortunately, though I shot many frames of this bird, I was happy with
very few of them, due to the harsh mid-day sun, which seemed to bleach
the color out of the bird’s reddish neck feathers. I would end up
returning to this site tomorrow specifically in hopes of getting more
shots of this bird.
Around noon I took my dog to the "dog beach". This is a beach
right in Fort Desoto park where dogs are allowed to swim in the water,
off-leash. She loved it. There were many, many dogs and
dog-owners there, and all were having a great time. Since I had
been fairly disappointed in the birding at Fort Desoto so far, I
decided to just spend some time with my dog. She had sat
patiently in the car for countless hours while I birded the Everglades,
Key Largo, Corkscrew, Estero, Tigertail, Venice, and now Fort
Desoto. She deserved to have some fun.
In the late afternoon I grabbed my gear and ventured back out to the
lagoon in the northwest corner of the park. There were plenty of
people (sunbathers and the like), but very, very few birds. In
the second, further lagoon, however, I was overjoyed to find a pair of
Oystercatchers foraging in the shallow water as the sun fell toward the
horizon behind me:
 Oystercatcher at
Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/7.1. 1/250 sec at ISO 100.
No flash.
In the image below I was able to get
some golden reflections from the high, sandy bank in the near distance
at the further edge of the pool:
Oystercatcher at
Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/6.3. 1/640 sec at ISO 250.
No flash.
Not only did the birds tolerage my
slow, on-my-belly-with-the-frying-pan approach, but eventually one even
emerged from the water to pose on the dry sand directly in front of me:
Oystercatcher at
Fort Desoto.
840mm at f/6.3. 1/640 sec at ISO 250.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
As you can see above, the bird was vocalizing at the time. I’ve
often "conversed" with my pet birds by whisting their calls back at
them, and for some stupid reason I decided to try whistling this bird’s
call back at him —
just for fun. I have no idea what the
translation was in bird-language, but apparently he found it highly
offensive, because the pair immediately flew off. Next time I’ll
keep my mouth shut and stick to operating the camera.
Soon the sun was setting out over the ocean, and though I spied a
large-ish group of photographers heading back to the parking lot, I
decided to try for some silhouettes. I was glad I did:
Willet (?) at
Fort Desoto Park.
600mm at f/4. 1/400 sec at ISO 1250.
No flash.
Once again I found myself somewhat disappointed by a well-known birding
location that I had been expecting would be excellent. Earlier in
the day a photographer had come up to me and said "Where are all the
birds? There are usually TONS of birds here..." Right around
that time some surfer dudes showed up and started "surfing" across the
shallow ponds in the lagoon, scaring off the last bird in sight.
I’m pretty sure I saw more people than birds at Fort Desoto that
day.
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