Birder’s Lounge

I guess the heat is easier to take if you spend most of your time in the water! This goes for herons and nieces.

This is a Little Blue Heron (Egretta caerulea) wading around, looking for fish. I spent a full day birding, and saw this cool blue bird at the end of my day. I seriously considered wading around in the water too…until I saw a snake.

This is the same heron, a few steps later and in completely different lighting. One of the reasons I braved an entire day out in the middle of the summer was that I wanted to try some new settings on my camera. I definitely learned some good things from my experimentation with camera settings, but I’ve got a long way to go with learning how to handle different extremes in lighting.

There are special glass filters that you can add to your lenses, to help with pictures that involve water and the reflections that often make photography tricky. They are called polarizers, and I have one…in a drawer.

This is a Green Heron (Butorides virescens), creeping along a floating log…you guessed it…looking for a meal. This was another challenging lighting situation - it was overcast, in a pond with dense vegetation, and a little out of range to make a good picture. Still, I was excited to see this colorful and interesting heron. According to Cornell’s All About Birds, this heron actually uses bait to coax fish to the surface, then makes a quick meal out of them. From Cornell:

The Green Heron is one of the few tool-using birds. It commonly drops bait onto the surface of the water and grabs the small fish that are attracted. It uses a variety of baits and lures, including crusts of bread, insects, earthworms, twigs, or feathers.

So did we learn from them, or did they learn from us?

I’ll leave you with another look at this Green Heron, and another view of cool, soothing water to help you through this hot summer!