Month: January 2018

I joined a 10-day photo challenge on my photo group.  As an exercise it’s meant to get you out and taking pictures.  You may have figured out that I don’t need a whole lot of encouragement to do exactly that.  ‘Choose your best picture of the day and post it’, but just one, was the instruction.  I thought that sounded like fun so I signed on for the challenge, even though I’m easily intimidated and have only posted one photo on that group so far.  Then I read someone’s helpful hints about things to keep in mind for your photo and editing for the challenge, and it took on a whole different, and not so much fun, sort of aspect.   So I went out for the sunrise at Bayport yesterday, but it didn’t happen.  There was a misty rain, and I thought a red glow in the mist might be nice, but instead of a glow the fog rolled in while I was waiting.  But I did get this photo, which I captioned, “Quoth the Grackle, Nevermore”.  The dogs and I found this visitor out on the lake when we got home from our walk…A Wood Stork!  It wasn’t so long ago that I saw my first one in person at Jenkin’s Creek, which isn’t all that far away, but I’ve never seen one out back before.  So even though I wanted to go check on the eagles again I stopped to take his picture first.  Finally, I was at the eagle’s nest, and the misty rain had cleared, and nothing was going on.  There was one eagle only, guarding the nest from the branch above. I did notice a lot of vultures in the immediate area and they seemed to be concentrating on the nest.  I saw her calling, but her mate didn’t come right away.  She stood her ground at that point, but did chase off one vulture a bit later.  When she came back she landed on the nest and was tending it again.

Right about then I heard someone say hello, and I discovered, to my surprise, that there was another photographer standing beside me, with his tripod and camera all decked out in camouflage trimmings.  He was from Connecticut and just visiting down here, he said.  He saw me with my camera and stopped, and was hoping that I wasn’t watching an Osprey since they have plenty of them to photograph in Connecticut.  He was quite happy when I pointed out the eagle and the nest, and shortly after that we saw one baby pop it’s head up.  When I told him that there were two of them, but one still didn’t appear, he told me that they can be aggressive, the babies can, and that if there isn’t enough food then one baby might devour it’s sibling. Now I knew I wasn’t leaving unless I saw two babies, and thankfully that happened, but not until shortly after he left.  I took 250 pictures yesterday, but the only ones that really mattered were the couple that showed the two chicks.  I still had a class to go to in Clearwater last night.  It was a long day…