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Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Spectacular end to the month!

Hard to believe it is the last day of November already!  And what a day it is!!

Beautiful morning

It was so nice that instead of heading directly to my volunteer office job…I grabbed a camera and went for a walk…

Eagles in the morning sunshine

Water levels have held pretty steady over night and the flats were alive with Bald Eagles and gulls….

Eagles!

one just can’t get enough of looking at the spectacle..

Morning scene

 

This was the breath taking view from the area of the log bay…all the surrounding mountains rec’d a fresh coating of snow last night, which just added to the picture!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Morning sunshine

looking south into the morning sunshine…

Morning sunlight

Morning sunshine high lights the head of this fellow perched in one of the ‘eagle trees’ by the viewing platform.  Unfortunately at the same time that I and another photographer were photographing this and other birds…a helicopter came flying very low over the estuary, turned and then headed back to whence it came….probably 1/3 of the birds that had been down on the flats took off in every direction.  There appeared to be no rhyme nor reason for the flight, except to startle the birds.

Juvenile

This young bird stayed put during the commotion resulting from the helicopter flight…

Eagle with snowy backdrop

as did this one…which created a rather spectacular shot with the backdrop of snow.

All of the photos to this point were taken with my Canon Powershot point and shoot camera from on the trail – I mention this because…..

 

 

 

 

This was the scene during my afternoon walk.  This is called being ‘off trail’ and unfortunately photographers are the worst offenders, and the more camera power they have, the worse they are at just having to get a little bit closer – getting ‘closer’ just means the birds move further away! but it seems if you have a camera capable of taking a nice group shot from the trail, you just have to try for an individual bird to fill the entire screen and if you have that, then you want a shot of just the eye…and so it goes and it is the birds that suffer from the disturbance….and that is my preaching for the day!

Off trail

Wigeon feeding

On the way back got a few pictures of these American Wigeon that were feeding along the shoreline…interesting that the males aren’t yet completely in their really colourful plumage.

Bald Eagle

and I’ll finish with one more Eagle shot…again taken from the trail…this time with my DSLR….the bird was unfortunately sitting in the shade.

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