Month: December 2016

Belted Kingfisher

Belted Kingfishers, at least the ones at Theler Wetlands, are one of the most elusive birds to photograph, though I occasionally get close to them in the fog before they fly off.

They must realize any photos you capture will have excessive noise requiring longer to correct than the photo is worth unless you’re nearly out of pictures to put up on your site.

Sometimes when there’s a fish run, though, you can capture them hovering over the river

completely indifferent to anyone on the shore.

Then the only question is if you’re lucky enough to have set a fast enough shutter speed to capture them mid-flight

because there’s certainly not enough time to reset the shutter speed before the Kingfisher flies away.

No Such Thing as a Seagull

I’ll have to admit that until I seriously took up bird watching a few (several??) years ago I had a rather low opinion of “seagulls.” Raised in Seattle, I tended to identify gulls with garbage cans or garbage dumps. I even thought there was a single gull species, “seagulls.”

It didn’t take long before I learned not to say “seagulls” around veteran birders who knew just how meaningless that term was. Nor did it take long to learn that several varieties of gulls never see the “sea.” One birder loved to ask if I would call a gull that lived in the bay a “Bagul.”

I also began to realize I was not seeing a single variety of gull every time I saw them. I was a little surprised to read on the internet that there are 17 different varieties of gulls in the United States alone, and 55 different varieties worldwide. I know I’ve seen at least 7 different varieties in the Puget Sound area in the last five or six years.

The Ring-Billed Gull, for instance,

is a medium-sized gull with a distinctive ring around its beak.

The Bonaparte Gull

is a rather beautiful, petite gull, much smaller than the Glaucous-Winged Gull that are common in the Puget Sound.

Hooded Mergansers

Winter in the Pacific Northwest is usually wet, drab grey, and the best time of year to be a birder. On the days you can get out, it’s easy to find birds that flock here to escape harsher conditions in other parts of the country.

Hooded Mergansers are favorites, both the simply elegant female Hooded Merganser

and the exquisitely elegant male.

Mr. Reliable

I often joke I’m never going to take another picture of a Great Blue Heron because I already have a hard-drive filled with them.

Inevitably, though, I take at least one or two more shots every time I visit Theler Wetlands. I take even more shots on days when birding is slow. After all, what photographer can resist a shot of a Great Blue Heron standing guard on a giant stump in the middle of a flooded wetland?

Great Blue Herons are largely indifferent to humans and are just as apt to walk towards you as to fly away.

When they don’t fly away, ducks just sit there indifferently; Great Blue Heron’s will often strike dramatic poses.

On foggy mornings, Great Blue Herons are often the only birds you can get close enough to photograph.