Coot Ballet

You never know when nature will present you with something amazing. Sometimes it's hidden in the seemingly mundane.  On Saturday, January 19, a group of us carpooled to Back Bay NWR near Norfolk, Virginia, for a field trip for The Virginia Beach Winter Wildlife Festival. 

Now, though I grew up in Richmond, I had never come back to Virginia on a real live birding field trip. Odd but true. I never realized people other than me went out looking for birds--together--until I went to college. I was thunderstruck that there was such a thing as social birdwatching. And I took to it like a coot to water.

gotta love this hat!

So we're tooling around the frozen impoundments at Back Bay with a freezing wind whipping through the open tram in which we're riding. I'm sitting next to my new friend Susan and her sister Annie and we're having a grand old time sharing an afghan. I'm shooting out the side of the tram.

Ring-necked duck and hen bufflehead take to the air.

A hen ruddy duck does, too. Her reflection is sharper than she is!

The famed tundra swans of Back Bay are consorting with a drift of snow geese, quite some ways away. The geese are in the foreground, but all the long straight necks you're seeing are swans.

Everywhere, we could hear the mellow hooting of the swans above the gabble of snow geese.
That beautiful sound took me right back to my first visit to Minneapolis when I was twelve years old, the first time I heard it. Skeins were going over downtown. I looked up when I heard their calls and there they were, the first wild swans I'd ever seen. I lit out down the crowded sidewalk, grabbing people's arms and pointing up. "Swans! Wild swans!! LOOK!!"

That was surely an epiphany for me. Not just seeing the swans, but finding myself absolutely compelled to get others to see and appreciate them, too.

Still at it, as you see. 

A rather forlorn sight: a flock of white ibis moping in snowy branches. I think they're rushing their push northward. There weren't any white ibis in coastal Virginia when I was a kid! You poor things should be in Florida or Georgia. Somewhere warmer than 20 degrees.

Find the forest fairy in this photo.
Might need to click on it to get a larger version.

but about that amazing thing I mentioned...

We're tooling along and there's a big flock of coots in a roadside ditch that somehow has remained open through the deep freeze. There were the usual disparaging remarks about the ordinariness of coots. But I was on fire. I like coots and I especially like coots in motion. These ungainly aquatic rails with their petal-lobed toes do a lot for me. Especially when they run.

As the coots pattered over the water and ice, I spotted a pied-billed grebe amongst them. "Grebe in flight! Grebe in flight!" I hissed to the group. Because you just do not get to see pied-billed grebes fly. Ever.
He's at the back, center. Look at that. Not to mention the fabulous thundering herd of coots.

My parting shot--grebe ballet. 

O beautiful.

My sincere thanks to the Virginia Beach Winter Wildlife Festival for having me down. I had a blast from start to finish. Check it out next January. Terrific people, great birding, all kinds of fun. Do it!

Gull-billed Terns and Audubon's Caracaras!

Rio Costero Ranch, near Laguna Atascosa NWR in south Texas, offered us killer looks at a bird little-known to me: the gull-billed tern Geochelidon nilotica.  It gives the impression of a very slender-winged gull. The heavy bill enhances its gull-like appearance. It's distributed worldwide, from both coasts of North America, the east coast of South America to southern Europe, temperate Asia, and even Australia!

Oh what a beautiful and welcome sight. I drank it in and took many souvenirs.

These birds were eating the bug du jour: dragonflies. More specifically, large green darners, perhaps Anax junius? Not sure. But they were big, and there were a lot of them. Anax is a migrant, and it travels in large flocks. I would imagine that our Ohio darners have been in Texas for some time by now. 

The gull-billed terns were dipping down and snagging the darners in flight. Which has to be tricky. Dragonflies are wicked fast and can change direction in a nanosecond. I admired the aerobatic skill of these beautiful birds as they made their meal on darners. And delighted in seeing the prey, revealed by the lens. Which is a Canon 70-300 IS L telephoto on a Canon 7D body. Oh, just get yourself one. Click on the link. 

Glider wings, sweeping up.

Other birds came by in perfect light, like these young white ibises. Ibii? I love this shot. Such harmony of pose and purpose.

But my favorite shot of the day was an Audubon's caracara, flaring overhead. Ahhh. After awhile, your photographer's eye just knows when you've nailed it without even looking at the result. Strong morning light, blue sky, AV central dot focus, go. And you've got every darn feather delineated. Oh, I love my new rig. Hard to believe I'll have had it a year in February. It's had a workout!

This odd tropical raptor takes carrion, insects, eggs, snakes, lizards, rodents...small prey, anything it can subdue with its short toes and long legs. They often walk around and hunt, sort of Dinornis style. In fact they remind me very much of dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs flying just overhead.

Bill Thompson III and Al Batt, who had them rolling in the aisles Friday night, puzzle over a pair of white-tailed hawks. It was a good morning's birding at Rio Costero Ranch and the Rio Grande Valley Birding Festival.