Feb
27
Friday
2926
photos
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Today
I awoke early in my Miami hotel and made the long trek to Everglades
National Park. My first stop was the legendary Anhinga Trail —
a place I have
long wished to visit. The main road through ENP (Everglades
National Park) is quite a long one, but the very first stop on that
road is Anhinga Trail. I don’t remember
the entry fee to the
park, but it wasn’t much, and
the receipt gets you into the park for a
week or maybe 5 days or something like that. There’s plenty of
parking space at Anhinga Trail, with clean restrooms and a soda machine
that accepts dollar bills, for the essential caffeine re-fueling.
Right out of the parking lot I encountered an active Anhinga nest,
though no chicks were visible yet. Further down the boardwalk I
did find several nests with large young in them. This latter
section
(see photo below) seems to be the most popular spot on the Anhinga
trail, both for
serious photographers and for the general public. Here, the
boardwalk widens into a deck with benches and interpretive
displays. During the several hours I spent here, this is where I
invariably encountered the one or two other photographers with 500mm+
lenses. Before us the swamp opened into a deep, wide pool with
several clusters of bushy trees in which Anhingas nested:
View from the
Anhinga Trail, Everglades National Park.
Tokina 12-24 wide angle lens at 12mm, f/8. ISO 400.
Hand-held.
HDR image composed from three exposures (1/4000, 1/1600, 1/500).
Getting pleasing shots of the anhingas proved difficult, due to the
"busy" backgrounds and the general "stickiness" (meaning lots of sticks
visible) of the scenes. The anhinga photo below illustrates this;
this is one of the least "sticky" of the anhinga photos I got that day:
Anhinga on the
Anhinga Trail.
600mm, f/7.1, 1/1000 sec (manual), ISO 400.
Flash on high-speed sync at full power with homemade flash extender.
Though not quite as tame or fearless as the birds at the Wild Bird
Center in Key Largo, several of the birds were brave enough to perch on
the boardwalk even as people walked by. The Great Egret shown
below gave the crowd a nice, close-up demonstration of how to swallow a
fish whole:
Great Egret on
the Anhinga Trail.
600mm at f/8. 1/500 sec, set manually, at ISO 400.
Fill flash on high-speed sync at full power (+3).
One thing that the Anhinga Trail does have a lot
of is gators. They were everywhere: in the water, sunning
themselves on the banks, even napping right on the walkway, within mere
feet of passers-by. Whenever a gator swam close to a bird
foraging at the water’s edge, the
bird would watch the reptile
carefully, often retreating a few feet from the water till the threat
had passed.
One of Many
Gators at the Anhinga Trail.
400mm at f/5. 1/800 sec, set manually, at ISO 400.
Overall, I was rather underwhelmed by the Anhinga Trail, at least in
terms of photo opportunities. All of the birds I encountered were
perched among or just in front of heavy foliage, which made for "busy"
backgrounds that I think distract the eye and render the subject (the
bird) less prominent in the photo. This might be less of a
problem at other times of the year. During my visit, many of the
birds were busy nesting, and it’s possible
that they might be more
inclined to perch up higher (with the sky as a background rather than
thick foliage) in other seasons, or even later in the day. I only
stayed till noon.
My next stop was a site in the ENP called Flamingo (a strange name,
since there are no flamingos there). Flamingo is at the opposite
end of the main Everglades road from Anhinga Trail, and is a
considerable drive away (about 40 minutes, as I recall). The main
attraction at Flamingo was the presence of numerous osprey nests,
several of which already had large chicks in them. Some of the
nests are so low that you can get near-eye-level shots, such as the one
below — note that the bird below was,
according to a park ranger,
hatched on January 1st of this year, and had just fledged
(and then
returned to the nest) the morning of my visit:
Osprey Fledgling
at Flamingo in the Everglades.
600mm at f/11. 1/320 sec, set manually, at ISO 400.
While at Anhinga Trail in the morning, I received several tips from
other photographers regarding productive sites in the general
vicinity. One was Wakodahatchee,
near which was another site
called Green Cay; these are
about an hour-and-a-half drive from the
Everglades. I added them to my list of possible sites to
visit. Shark Valley,
another site within the Everglades, seemed
more attractive to me (simply due to the relative proximity), though it
would require some driving, too, since
it was reached via another entry point into the ENP. Much closer
was Eco Pond, which
reportedly had some Roseate Spoonbills. I’d
never seen a Spoonbill in the wild. Photographing this species
became one of my major goals for the trip, and as you’ll see, it
would
not be an easy goal to fulfill.
Down the road from Flamingo I found a campground where my dog could
spend an hour swimming in the ocean, and then I headed to Eco Pond,
arriving in late afternoon. I was told to look out for American
Kestrels, though I didn’t see
any. An accipiter (Cooper’s or
Sharp-shinned Hawk) flew from a perch as I approached. Later I’d
see a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks noisily fly over. The pond
itself was quite small, and only partially filled with water.
Crawling on my belly, I was able to sneak up nearly to the edge of the
water (before the ground got too soft) and photograph some Black-necked
Stilts that were foraging nearby:
Black-necked
Stilt at Eco Pond.
840mm at f/7.1. 1/1600 sec, set manually,
at ISO 320. No flash.
This has been one of my favorite birds ever
since I spent
several afternoons watching them at the Palo Alto Baylands near
Stanford University in the late 1990’s. The
flock at Eco Pond,
consisting of only about 5 birds, seemed completely unconcerned about
my presence. In order to make a low approach, to avoid scaring
off the birds, I had to slide over sand and some vegetation with my big
600mm lens, which is not an easy task. Fortunately, I had my
trusty frying pan with me. Placing the lens’ tripod
mount /
handle into the frying pan, I was then able to slide the entire rig
easily over the terrain. You can buy professional "ground pod"
units like this for about $175, but my $7 frying pan from Wal-Mart
works just fine for me.
I enjoyed photographing the stilts immensely.
As time flew by,
the sun fell further toward the horizon directly behind me, imparting a
reddish cast to the bare sticks and tree stumps across the pond, and
this reddish glow in turn reflected off the water to create some
wonderful backgrounds for my stilt images:
Black-necked
Stilt at Eco Pond.
840mm at f/5.6. 1/1000 sec, set manually,
at ISO 1250. No flash.
In addition to the Black-necked Stilts, there were both Greater and
Lesser Yellowlegs (see below), Killdeers, and a number of smaller
shorebirds that I know only as "peeps". The overall numbers of
birds weren’t
great, but since I was able to get close enough to get
some decent photos with nice, colorful backgrounds, I was
satisfied.
Lesser Yellowlegs
at Eco
Pond.
840mm at f/7.1, 1/640 sec at ISO 320. No flash.
Below is a Killdeer that waded through the thick mud closer to where I
was positioned. Though none of the shots shown here involved the
use of flash, I became totally dependent on flash once the sun had set
a bit further and left all the birds in shadow.
Killdeer at Eco
Pond.
840mm at f/7.1. 1/1250 sec at ISO 500. No flash.
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