That title is both bad grammar and no joke.
Today while all the working stiffs were in offices, on computers, or doing uniformed duties, I stopped for a coffee then peacefully carried my camera on a perambulation around Deer Lake. Retirement is good for this sort of thing. This area gets enough walkers that the birds don’t remain shy for long. Not many birds were out this morning but the waterfowl are dependable subjects and the local Canada Geese may be the most dependable of all.
With the geese lined up like this, a hunter could have Arkansawed about five with one shot. The golfers and gardeners would have applauded. The honkers didn’t mind me shooting with a camera at all though. They glanced up occasionally not in alarm but to see if I might have some bread crusts.
When you are really close to geese you learn that they mutter under their breath. Gabble is the word that comes to mind but that may have been influenced by “Scrabble”. Feathers rattle, wings whoosh, and heads bob with the business of snagging feather lice, orienting vanes, spreading feather oil and positioning down. Maintenance not unlike ground time for an aircraft.
Unfortunately, the “song” of an American Coot is more of a call and that call is a popping croak and creak that sounds like an amplified amphibian. Coots, like Labrador retrievers, present a photographic problem in that their surfaces just seem to absorb light into eternal blackness requiring a fair bit of deliberate over-exposure or post-processing if you have the resolution to permit it.
The second most-accommodating species, of almost barnyard ubiquity, are the Mallards. The gloss, yellow bill, and white undercarriage make them really pop in the lens. In the shot above I should have raised my ISO by 100 or bumped to 1/400th of a second to have stop-action on the wings and the water shedding uniformly off them but he is still handsome.
Once coiffed, Sir Mallard Drake looks ready for breeding season (or the pot). The pairing season is upon us and drake waterfowl are near their snappiest coloration right now in January. Their sequence is pair now, migrate with their hens, breed and fill the nest with fertilized eggs, then in true cad form, abandon the incubating hen (28 day sit) and look for additional love elsewhere. Eventually, bunching up with other drakes for safety and departing the area for bigger water never to see his seasonally beloved hen again. Nature has its methods and pattern and they rarely fit the moral structure of humanity.
The drake is mostly under and his hen in the foreground is mid-leap to submerge too. It is really tough for a photographer to anticipate the little jump they do for submergence and most digital cameras have a tiny lag that makes it almost a lucky snap to catch them mid-arch.
This was as close as I got today to the dive-leap. The B &W treatment enhances the monochromatic bird on a monochromatic background. With enough light, there actually is a lot of iridescent shimmer to their heads but not during this patch of cloud cover.
Hummingbirds over-winter here around the human-provided feeders and there is some minor controversy over this dependence putting them at risk of overwintering in a previously un-occupied part of their range. They may be poised for a climate change induced die-off if we get an extremely cold patch. Hummers are almost as dependable and human-habituated as the geese. Even for this close-shooting, a telephoto helps with such tiny subjects.
It is a bad image but just WTF enough to include. A Bald Eagle spread eagle (haw haw) in the water and flopping its way to shore with a feathery breaststroke.
Once on the rocks, it was clear that he was dragging a soon-to-be lifeless Cormorant he had caught over the water. Apparently, the dense cormorant (in more ways than one) was a little too heavy for him to fly to the shoreline. Whatever it takes for these white-headed dragons to eat; carrion, Chihuahuas, cormorants or chum salmon.
It was nice that I could do a little nature communing right here in the middle of the Fraser Valley adjacent to 3.5 million people in the greater Vancouver Metro area. Thanks birds, you made my day!
