photography

One very active and knowledgeable birder over on the Cape happened to mention a few weeks back, in a post to B-Mail, that he thought a fall pelagic boat trip (Sea Whales and Tales, sponsored by NECWA and organized by Krill Carson) out of Plymouth this fall would be pretty sure to produce good numbers of seabirds, based on his observations from up near Provincetown, his other forays onto the high seas this summer in search of birds and on reports gleaned from other observers doing the same sort of thing.  So I signed up.  His prediction tipped the scales for me to go; and I signed up a birding buddy from the Vineyard to go with, for the company and for sharing expenses, since the Plymouth trip leaves too early in the morning for me to take a ferry off the Vineyard and get there by departure time.

The morning weather looked totally bad.  Sucky to begin with and likely sucky all day long.  However, we were committed to going.  It’s an eight in the morning until six in the evening run, so you are stuck for a long time if you are convinced you should really be somewhere else.  Or if your bio systems are not happy on a vessel that  lurches in most of the directions of the compass at the same time.  There is a larger driving force behind that first step onto the deck of the boat:  if you bail, you are out the ninety-five bucks, but, even more daunting, the people who do tough it out are almost sure to see something great on the trip you wussed on.  If you were not dedicated to finding cool birds, with or without all the great marine mammals, you would not have signed up to go in the first place.

 

 

I must interrupt this newscast for a timely and non-sequitur aside:  the day previous to the sailing of the whale- and bird-watching venture Pete and I had just enough time after taking a 3:45pm ferry off the Vineyard to make it to Dennis to look for a rare and vagrant hummer, a Broad-billed Hummingbird, that had been frequenting a feeder at someone’s house for maybe a couple of weeks.  We followed directions printed off the internet  and parked on a small suburban street.  Pete went ahead while I got my camera out of the Jeep.  When I looked up, he was gone, but a lot of the people from a lot of cars parked right where we were, they were going into a house across the street.  I knew there was something in the directions about walking around the right side of the house to get to the feeder setup.  So I did.  It was not really a path, but I went.  Around the back there was a long table set up, with bottles of booze and mixers.  I turned on my heel to walk out the way I had gone in thinking and hoping that the guests waiting to be greeted at the front door might think I was a photographer hired to cover the party.  After all I had not seen anyone going in the front door who did not get a great big welcoming hug, which I thought mildly strange at the time.  It could have been a wake, for all I know.

Anyway, the hummingbird house was across the street.  Pete was sitting in a plastic chair among others set up for the purpose of waiting for the hummer to show, and he gave me a big thumbs up.

It was getting pretty late.  The hummingbird would sit in a big pine nearby preening, then zoom to the feeder for a few seconds, giving a little chip each time he leaned forward for a nectar sip.  The light for photos was terrible, but I have to include this awful flash photo to document the moment:

 

 

 

Check out the range map on these puppies in a field guide.

 

 

 

 

Back to the pelagic trip.  Pete and I had been building karmic concensus from dinner the previous night, joking about seeing a jaeger of some sort on this trip.  Not just a jaeger, which was quite likely, but a jaeger chasing a Sabine’s Gull, which would be a life bird for both of us.  Ha-ha.  Sure.

There were probably four Sabine’s Gulls spotted on the trip.  The first two we missed, because no-one could refind them after the initial sighting, which started me grinding my teeth and grousing.  The third one sighted flew right by the length of the boat.  All who cared got to see it; and it was a beauty, an adult still in breeding plumage, meaning a black “hood” on its head.  It was such a great way to discover a new bird, a bird I thought I might never see.  If you look up Sabine’s Gull and see how little time it is likely to spend anywhere near land anywhere along the New England coast, you will see what I mean.

The other peak fun times watching the seabirds – and there were lots of shearwaters out there – was to see the jaegers chasing the terns, Common, Roseate and Forster’s, that fed on bait fish pushed to the surface by larger fare,including fast moving schools of tuna. 

These photos are not great.  Remember, it was raining and salt-spraying.  They do give a sense of what it’s like to see one of these chases through binoculars or a camera lens.  These shots almost look like black & whites it was so dreary, but the avian action was intense!

In the top photo two young Laughing Gulls get into the chase.

Most of the target terns, it seems to me, were young Commons, once or twice a Forster’s.  Usually the action was too far away to tell. 

 

 

 

The Parasitic Jaeger’s pointed central tail feathers show quite well here.

 Seeing this kind of show is the return on investment for an all-day pelagic trip of this sort.  You don’t always luck out, but sometimes braving the adverse weather pays nice dividends.

To wind up, here are two Cory’s Shearwater shots:

There is a lot of feather molting going on here.  Bump up the photo.

Birds are cool!  Lanny

These images and more are available for purchase. Contact me or View store.

 

I have been looking at birds since my childhood up in the northwest corner of Connecticut.  I was an only child, growing up four miles out of town, riding the bus to school.  When the school bus dropped me off, I walked about a half mile home, crossing three bridges (one covered!) over arms of the Housatonic River that had been constructed to manage the river flow for a hydroelectric station downstream.

The farm property where I was raised had fields, orchards, tall sugar maples and foothill mountains with rock ledges and the Appalachian Trail along the ridgeline.  What an idyllic place to grow up, assuming you like the country!  Anyway, birding as a pastime was a natural evolution for a kid making his own entertainment out of his surroundings.

Now I head up a multi-national conglomerate with global subsidiaries that reach around the …  Kidding!  You might as well get used to a certain level of smalltime humor that I just cannot help.  I think this blog may be an outlet for the occasional hilarious-to-me and possibly ho-hum-to-you remark that wants to leap from my fingertips.  Maybe it was that description of young life in a bucolic country setting, a bluebird on my shoulder, a rabbit at my feet,  that needed some balancing out.  It is an election year!

Yes, I do digress.  And maybe that’s what will make blogging fun, instead of a dreary duty call, as I was getting used to seeing it.  As bird photography has liberated me from sitting before an easel in my studio, writing what comes up, rather than what readers are expected to find in a local newspaper let’s say, could be a gas.

 

Birds are cool!  Lanny

These images and more are available for purchase. Contact me or View store.