Photographing Pelicans
I had a comment posted on this photo a while back, and I’ve been meaning to follow up on it. With the weather outside, it’s a good day to do some catching up.
This photo is incredible! I have a 40D and shoot a lot but don’t think I could have gotten this kind of sharpness and the highlighting on the subject, especially considering that it was moving and you presumably couldn’t get that close to it.
What kind of lens were you using? Tripod? Photoshop techniques?
This photo was shot handheld with my D30 and the 100-400 IS, my standard setup for wandering around.
Down at Morro Bay harbor, there’s a fish cleaning station. As you might imagine, when the fishermen are cleaning, this can attract a number of gulls, but there’s also a group of pelicans that have figured out that this is free-meal city.
The result for photographers is that you have really good, close access to these birds because they are habituated to humans. I was generally no more than 8-10 feet away, and these shots were taken at betweeo 100-150mm at F5.6 in aperture mode.
It’s not really a good situation for the birds, because this level of habituations isn’t healthy. Beyond the problems of becoming dependent on humans for food, this lack of wariness for the birds can lead to everything from dog attacks to being hit by cars, because without some fear of humans, the brids simply don’t think to stay out of harms way. Their aggressiveness — literally coming within a foot or two of the fisherman, sometimes inches — is risky, too. The fishermen we were watching used a hose to discourage the pelicans, but stories of more drastic action (including cleaning knives) appeared when I discussed this with the Morro Bay photogs. There aren’t many good answers here, but perhaps cleaning stations like this need canopies or some other covering to restrict access to these begging birds.
This isn’t necessarily a good situation for the fisherman, either. As you can see from this photo, the Brown Pelican foot is webbed, but still has some pretty significant claws as well. Not something I want landing on my shoulder…
The repeated attempts by the birds to snag lunch and the fisherman to make them leave is what set up this shot. I realized the pelicans were flying away, circling around and coming back in for another try. That gave me the ability to set up anticipating that flight. I had a choice between good light or a clean background, and I decided to shoot for the light and blur out the background as well as I could. Looking at the results, that was the right choice, the texture in the features is very good and the pelican stands out from the background well.
Post-processing? Very little. This shot basically made itself. I might have darkened the background a bit, but that’s pretty much what I started with.
Pelicants are one of the birds that first attracted me to birding — I remember a trip back in the mid-90’s where we were in Arcata near the harbor watching the Pelicans fish and thinking what awesome birds they were. Many years later when I started birding Pelicans were an early interest, and I still photograph them at any opportunity.
That led to this series of photos, which I’ve set up as a slideshow. At Shoreline lake one morning, there were some brown pelicans fishing. When I watch birds, one of the things I enjoy is studying their actions and behavior. With these birds, it was fun to watch their fishing and flying habits. When a pelican takes off from the water, they start by flapping the wings, but they also push off with their webbed feet. Two or three of these “hops” happen before they have enough speed to leave the water, and then the landing gear come up.
When they’re fishing, they’ll take the hops, and if they see a fish or something in the water, suddenly abort the takeoff, pull in the wings and flip foward into the water beak first. If they don’t see anything after a few hops, they’ll stop. This is a lower-energy fishing style than they’ll use other times when they’ll take off and fly across the water about 15 feet up looking for prey, then tuck the wings and dive in beak first after it.
These young brown pelicans were nice enough to give me the ability to take a few sequences of their fishing and takeoffs that show this hop-hop-hop behavior, and when I saw the photos in sequence, it really called out to be made into a slideshow, which I think shows this wonderfully.
Slow down, enjoy the show…
Sometimes I think here in Silicon Valley we forget just how wonderful and beautiful this place we live in is.
With the weather having returned to winter weather and some much needed rain, I spent Saturday indoors, working on stuff, like cleaning up the photo library (lots of half-finished imports, etc) and tweaking the blog, and writing.
Today, the weather cleared up a bit, so I headed out to run a couple of errands, and while out, I decided I had to get out and go birding, just a bit. So I ended up at Calero Reservoir down in Coyote Valley, hoping maybe to find the bald eagle that’s been hanging out there (nope), or maybe the loon (nope). It’s interesting to track this area season to season — last winter we had good numbers of loons around the area, this winter, we have had close to zero, but large numbers of mergansers. Birds are so unreliable — sort of. While these kinds of variations happen every year, we also have birds that return, year after year, to the same location and many times the same tree.
I missed out on the main birds I was looking for, but heading back into Coyote Valley, I ran into an osprey with a fish.
It wasn’t exactly pleased at being watched, so it gave me two steps away from the car and flew up, grumping at me as it left. It ended up circling around me a bit, then coming down in the middle of a pasture out beyond the geese and staring at me while it ate until I left.
About that point it started raining, of course. But I saw a beautiful cloud formation across the pasture, so I grabbed my wide angle camera and started shooting. About that time I realized the rain was bouncing — it wasn’t raining, it was hailing. The things I do for you people to get interesting pictures…
By the way — geese do not like hail. Just saying.
But looking at that vista, taking those pictures, made me stop and remember, just for a minute, how beautiful this area is and how many things we have going for us here when we stop being too busy to look and explore. Those of you living in sleeping bags under your desks don’t know what you’re missing. Hopefully you’ll figure it out before it’s too late…
Of course, after a minute, I realized it was still hailing, and decided warm and dry would win out over more photography for now, and got in the car, cranked up the heater, and came home to what the NHL All-Star game…
Winter birdwatching…
I’ve been doing a bunch of early year winter birding, trying to get the winter birds on my list before the wander off. It’s been a lot of fun (my first winter “rush”) and I’ve had some pretty good luck; so far, my year list is at 120 species, about six weeks ahead of last year, and I’ve added a couple of new life birds to the list as well (Red-breasted merganser and ring-necked duck). It almost feels like the birds are parading for me now; I went up to Redwood Shores where I knew a spotted sandpiper had hung out in the past, and in it flew and wandered around a bit (and for good measure, I’ve since seen them twice more, at Vasona and Alviso).
I went off to Sunnyvale Water Polution Control Plant on Monday since the weather was good. I haven’t been there in over a year since I whacked the knee, but now that I’m starting to build in some mileage again, I figured I’d try out to the radar dish and back.
As I got there, a couple of hunters were putting a boat into the channel right where the parking lot is. I figured they would probably scare up anything in the channel as they paddled out (which they did… more in a sec). Down where the pump station is and the channel heads north past the old landfill I had a nice red-tail on the power pole and a california towhee scratching in the leaf mould. Much to my amusement, just as I was thinking “I’ve seen green heron here before”, one flew in and landed. It flex back out towards the water plant when I tried to get a better angle on it, kvetching the whole way. That, of course, didn’t help, because the hunters flushed it twice more before it got really annoyed and flew north up that channel and away from all of us, loudly protesting.
Not much in the reeds — lots of crowned sparrows and some yellow-rumps (mostly heard). On the pond were coots, pied-billed grebes, a few ducks, two snowy egrets, and the occasional d-c cormorant flying by, as well as a single great blue near the landfill channel. Up the hill on the landfill area was a flock of about 25 canada geese.
After making the turn out towards the radar disk, I noticed a black-crowned night heron in the reeds in the channe between the two paths (looking out towards the salt pond to the south). Realizing the hunters were headed out into that area, I decided to stop and watch the show. Ever wonder how many herons hang out in that area? The answer is 35-40 (two were visible to me before the hunters showed up). They also flushed a 2nd green heron and annoyed the blackbirds and two marsh wrens.
After that, I headed back in because I had to deal with some email. I had two probable common yellowthroats, but not enough of a look at either to make them definitive to my tastes.
Oh, out in the field at disk drive trying to convince me they were burrowing owls were a small flock of marbled godwits. Out at state and spreckles I saw a spotted sandpiper, a few western sandpipers a couple of killdeer and the usual suspects (at least one mew gull, no glaucous among the gulls). Out at shoreline I mostly saw people fighting over parking places because it’s a holiday, so I didn’t stick around..
On Sunday, Laurie and I went out for our January trip to O’Neill Forebay and Merced National Wildlife Refuge, before the cranes and geese leave for the northern trip. It was a fun trip, the the drought we’re seeing in California was horribly obvious; the reservoir very empty, the hills already browning into the spring golden colors. Bird numbers at the forebay were light, and numbers at Merced were much lighter than normal. We saw few sandhill cranes at all until the sunset fly-in, and geese were in the thousands vs. the tens of thousands. Talked to a couple of other birders there who felt the same way.
As I write this, it’s actually raining. we really need it; here’s hoping it makes a dent.
My 2008 goals for birding were fairly straightforward; 220 species to the life list for the year, 200 species for the year list, and my long-term goal, which was to find a bird that was a notable addition to the birding group — it’s one thing to chase birds other people find and add them to the list, for me, the real goal is to start finding birds that other birders can then also find.
I missed the 200 for the year by three, partly because of weather and partyl because of holiday time issues; I could have made it but it seemed an artificial thing to do, so I focussed on other things. I’ve since covered the life list with birds that were available in 2008 where I found them, so I don’t feel bad about it.
And I finally found that “special” bird; a red-breasted sapsucker showed up in Redwood Shores and was first seen by me and later refound by others. Even nicer, the photos I got of the bird indicate it’s actually a likely hybrid — red-breasted sapsucker x red-naped sapsucker is the most likely candidate. That made my day, and turned into a really nice find. I’ve got photos on flickr for those interested.
When I went down to Vasona, I ran into a couple from the East Coast birding the lake, and we had a nice chat. One thing I like to do when I run into non-local birders is share what I know and help them better see the area — it’s a real joy to see birds we see here as common in fresh eyes. In Vasona, that was talking about snowy and great egrets, as well as showing off black phoebes, one of those birds you basically have to shoo off around here — but to someone from back east, they’re true joys to sit and watch as they chase bugs and flit around. It’s a fun way to step back and see the hobby from a different viewpoint.
My birding goals for 2009?
I’m not settting any hard goals right now. I want to continue improving my ID capabilities and see what I can accomplish. My current hope is to explore more of Santa Clara County (where I do about 60% of my birding) and San Mateo County (where I do about 30%) and visit a wider variety of habitats. Now that the knee and ankle are to the point I can start doing more walking (and I need to start building my mileage and conditioning again) it’ll open up more places to go walk and bird. I still want to do this mostly for enjoyment and the challenge, and not turn it into a chore.
One of the things I’m experimenting with is using Google Maps do document birding areas and sighting locations. Once I get that under control I’ll start posting those maps here; when I get enough content to make sense, I plan on relaunching siliconvalleybirders.org sometime this year (why the first one failed is a story I’ll write about one of these days, but the domain is currently parked waiting for V2). I think there are some nice capabilities for helping people bird the area, and we’ll see how it goes.
So 2009 has started out really well; the ability to show up and have species like Green Heron just pop up and say hello won’t continue — but I’m going to enjoy it while it lasts.
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