After yesterday’s
successes I decided to spend the entire day in Cape Coral trying to get
more owl photos. I ended up doing just that, though with the rain
and
variable activity levels I spent quite a bit of time driving back and
forth between the various nesting sites distributed throughout the
city.
Last night and this morning there were torrential downpours and
thunderstorms, so I waited until noon to even venture out of my
hotel. The
roads
were so flooded it was hard to get around. In the morning all the
owls were out, some
even perching on the wooden cross-posts. It continued to rain
hard till about mid-afternoon, so I just watched from inside my
car.
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A waterlogged burrowing owl in Cape
Coral. It rained a lot today!
(1/300sec 600mm f/5.6
ISO200)
In mid-afternoon
the rain lessened to a sporadic drizzle. Though I was able to get
a few photos of the owls by shooting from inside my car (with the
window down), there was no interesting
activity—just
static portrait shots. All the birds just sat
around waiting
for the rain to end, and then preened and dried off after it finally
ended.
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The real excitement for me came when some locals
aggressively drove their SUV up to my car and asked if I was a sexual
predator looking for little
girls to molest (!). They said they had two daughters and were
concerned about reports of a sexual predator that was lurking in the
area. They wondered if it might be me, since I was hanging around
the neighborhood. Dumbstruck, I simply pointed to my enormous
camera lens and to
the owls it was directed at across the street and then it suddenly
seemed to dawn on them that I was photographing wildlife, not abducting
children.
In the late afternoon I found that I was getting
only the most marginal of owl shots, and decided to switch to shooting
the cattle egrets that were actively hunting in the field behind the
Cape Coral library:
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Cattle egret in a flooded field
behind the Cape Coral library.
(1/300sec 600mm f/7.1
ISO640)
I didn’t have any
good images of this
species previously, so I was very happy to shoot the birds as they
foraged in the flooded field. The lack of direct sunlight was a
blessing, because in the diffuse light I was able to nicely expose the
dim scenery without clipping any highlights in the white bird.
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Shortly before leaving for the day I
walked completely around the library in search of any other nests or
birds I
might have overlooked. In the process I encountered an entirely
new species (for me) —the
loggerhead shrike:
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Loggerhead shrike in front of the
Cape Coral library.
Not a great photo, but my
very first glimpse of this species.
(1/300sec 600mm f/6.3
ISO640)
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