Peace on Tybee Island

It's never easy to leave home, especially when Bill's also called away, but I have to say it's getting easier for me. Phoebe, at 16, has it all under control. She keeps the house, feeds the animals, whips Liam into line on time, fixes the dinners that I leave for her, drives her  brother where he needs to be. And with her independence and tied-together usefulness goes a freedom I haven't felt in a decade and a half. I can leave. And she's got my back.

So I travel now in a pure way, an unruffled, unworried, joyous way, and it feels divine.

I get to go where camellias are in full mid-winter bloom (Tybee I and Savannah), bringing me back to my childhood in Richmond. Oh, to be able to grow this stunning member of the tea family in Ohio. Don't know if global warming's going to accomplish that for me in my lifetime, but I'm hopeful. ;) Hey, might as well roll with it.

I had loads of fun on this trip, just rolling with and in whatever it gave me. Sometimes the seeming calamities (rescheduling, snow in a usually snowless place) turned out to be huge blessings. I got to shoot pictures of gulls and kids and a dog on the beach. I got to watch snow falling on salt water.

I got personal with ring-billed gulls.

A young redtail (probably born in spring 2012) circled over our car at the Savannah Dredge Spoil, and, asking the driver to stop, I burst out of the car and started clicking. I have learned to take full advantage of close birds in good light.

You beautiful thing. I always talk to birds as I shoot, sounding, I'm sure, like a fashion photographer trying to get the best out of a model.

The young hawk cupped its wings and floated right over, making tight circles over this woman with her camera. Did it know what I wanted, which was to bask in its beauty? It seemed to.

I love this shot, the hawk peeking over the edge of its wing, every bar, every feather edging perfect, perfect. Newly minted.

Oh my goodness.

 

 Did a similar clamber-out-of-the-car maneuver with some turkey vultures. I'm always looking to improve my library of turkey vulture shots. It's my totem bird, after all...I need good pictures of it.

Look at that reflective underwing! Molten pewter.

 One of the best things I saw on this trip was an osprey, at a great distance, plunging into a quiet backwater on Tybee I., Georgia. It came up with something flashing silver in its talons. Got a fish!
To my puzzlement, it circled and circled, bearing the fish. Why wasn't it landing? As I watched, I became more and more curious, and I got the group to focus on it to try to figure out what it was up to. So we're all watching this bird circle heavily with its prey, and we're speculating that maybe it's having trouble carrying it or subduing it. Finally it heads for a large pine. It's going to land.

As we watch, it swings up its feet to make the landing, and a fish flies straight out of its grip and into the woods below! Oh no! It lost its meal!

But then it lands and I get the scope on it and darned if it doesn't still have a fish in its talons! It had made a lucky strike, grabbing a fish in each foot. No wonder it couldn't land!

These things happen. It's embarrassing, but you can't land with a fish in each fist. You have to drop one.

By the time I got these photos (by lucky coincidence, it was perched right over the exit road as we left), he had consumed most of the remaining fish. You can tell it's a male by its almost unmarked breast. I'd never seen an osprey get two fish at once, though I know it happens, and I was so happy we were all watching when this bird had to jettison one of them. You don't see that every day.

I'll leave you with some serenity, the kind you can only get with  sea and shore.

My view on Tybee. I ran on this beach each morning. Those were my favorite times.

Another Tybee sunrise. How divine, to open the blinds and see this.

 A GOS birder takes in the scene off a quiet dock.

And so do I.

Good morning, Marsh. You're smelling a little funky, but I love it. The air is soft and warm on my bare arms. There's Tybee Light in the background.

When you can't tell water from sky, that's a special kind of peace. I wish it for you.

Grateful, that's all, that I get to pull up stakes and go every now and then, and call it work. I don't take a second of it for granted. That trip recharged my batteries, cut a couple of particularly cruel weeks out of my winter. I could get used to Tybee in January. I know I'll go back.


My deepest gratitude to the Georgia Ornithological Society for bringing me down to this piece of heaven for being so warm and gracious; to Coastal Georgia Audubon for taking me up on my offer to speak to them, too, and showing me Jekyll Island; and to the Virginia Beach Winter Wildlife Festival for a fabulous time with birds and beaches in the snow. Y'all go check these places out now, y'hear?

Skimmerrama on Tybee Island

One good encounter can make my day. Or my whole trip. I had been yakking on the phone with a friend one sunny cool morning. I'd done my 5 mile run and my crunches and lifts and was thoroughly enjoying myself on Tybee Island, Georgia, when I saw a flock of several hundred black skimmers settle like ashes on the beach.



How deluxe it was to have so many. I threw on some clothes, hoisted the big lens and hurried out to act like the last thing in the world I cared about was several hundred black skimmers resting on the deserted beach.

I walked straight toward the water, watching them out of the corner of my eye, looking off to the side, out to sea.



I got closer and closer. The near birds: still sleeping. Good.



I mustn't get any closer. I couldn't believe my luck.  Such beautiful, beautiful birds.



They found a four-winged dinosaur fossil in China. Here's the modern-day version.



I don't know what corollary of Murphy's Law followed me around the beach at Tybee, but every time I had a photo op with cooperative birds, somebody came along and put them all up for me.
Even on a deserted winter beach, it seems somebody's always willing to walk plumb into the middle of a peacefully resting flock. No polite detours for us, nossir. Right smack through the middle.

Dum de dum de dum...buncha birds...whatever...never mind the woman lying on her side with a camera pointed at them, quietly cursing my complete lack of situational awareness.




Ack Ack Ack Ack Ack said the skimmers

and went up in a slice of black wings

delighting a little girl and

incidentally

me

Their shadows raced across the sand and I almost keeled over from delight at the perfection of the scene.

They wheeled and turned

strange terns that they are

I failed to get used to the sight of several hundred skimmers overhead. I don't think I ever could.

Birding with a Georgia Ornithological Society group, I looked up to see this flock going past Tybee Lighthouse. 

I couldn't help it.  I squealed and laughed and freaked out, shooting and shooting as the big black and white birds rowed easily over.

Someone in the group softly whispered the equivalent of "Jeez, take a powder!"

as if this were not the most miraculous thing that ever happened, having 600 skimmers pass just overhead. OK. Maybe you're used to this. Maybe you see it every day. I don't.

I was not embarrassed, nor was I about to apologize. I just felt sorry for anyone who couldn't fully appreciate a sight like this in the cloud-swirled sky, no matter how many times he might have seen it.

I turned to the group, smiled, and explained myself in only five words.

"This doesn't happen in Ohio."

Beach Buffleheads

It's rare to have buffleheads close to the beach. 

I went straight from the cooperative sanderling to a pair of buffleheads. The drake, unbelievably clean-cut in black, white, cobalt violet and viridian. Oh, let me run  my hands over your satin head, please. If I can't do that, I would love to take your picture.

You may. But I would like to have my wife in the next one. I am married, you know. Even though your offer is enticing.

Oh beautiful buffleheads, diving for mussels and clams, picking them off the rocks below, grinding them in your gizzards. Thank you for swimming in close.

They bob like toys on the gentle waves, disappearing from view and bobbing up again, and dive in synchrony.

The waves lap at my boots as I strain to get closer, but they drift out to sea. Time's up.

A drift of ruddy turnstones shuffles onto the rocks. Having kept one for several weeks until it recovered from a bacterial infection, I adore turnstones. 

They're busy, friendly little birds. I used to hide his chicken gizzard bits under large stones. Gave him something to do, I did. He used to put his shoulder to the bigger ones. Oof! and he'd turn them over.

 One stops to preen.

 His orange feet, a study in weight distribution.

We find a live whelk on the beach and decide to leave him until the tide comes back in. He's got water. He might know exactly where he is and wish to stay there. Whelk wishes. Respect them. 

Finally, two purple sandpipers fly in. Our quest bird, speaking strictly for the others. I was perfectly happy with the turnstones, the sanderling and the whelk. And the buffleheads.

But oh, he's beautiful, with a sateen sheen that, if you use your imagination, might have some violet in it.

Back home, Phoebe cuddles Chet

and the snow settles on lawn chairs.

and I miss them, but I am so happy to be on a sunny beach in Georgia. 

A Woman, A Plan, A Sanderling

A coldish day on the beach at Tybee Island, Georgia. We're on a Georgia Ornithological Society field trip to the Tybee Lighthouse jetty, where we've heard there may be purple sandpipers. 

But there's a bird I need to speak with first. A sanderling in winter plumage is dancing over the algae-coated rocks, against a backdrop of Atlantic. And I cannot tear myself away.

This is the beauty of bird photography. A bird close by, in perfect light, is a banquet of delights for a photographer. It doesn't matter what the bird is, though a sanderling is certainly a lovely bird.

My universe suddenly contracts down like a lens onto that bird, those colors, this moment.

And I become one with him, looking for his changing mood, his next move.

He could be a giant Rok on a tree-grown mountainside, stomping the forest with elephantine feet.

Or a very small sandpiper against a very large ocean, 

where container ships the length of three New York City blocks thrum by, loaded with cars and appliances and who knows what all.

Or he could be a winter sanderling, skittering by us at arm's length. Gotta love a bird who will do that.

 The rare ones will wait. This one's putting on a show.