All My Blogs

  Top:  white pelican, osprey, curlew Bottom:  flamingo, coot, snowy egret As someone who works on stuff, I know that "The right tool for the right job" is an important adage.  And although I have used lineman's pliers as hammers and screwdrivers as pry bars, I can do a better job with the right equipment.  In a way, birds have the same predicament and philosophy.   There are six main ways that water birds obtain food.  They can: Catch it with long necks and pointy beaks.  Such are the egrets, herons, and cranes.  A long neck allows lightning strikes, while a sharp beak can be used to both impale and thrash prey. Sieve benthic material.  Wide bills with lamellae allow bottom mud and organic material to be strained, pushing out water and tiny solids like sand and silt while keeping small organisms hidden in the debris.  Birds with this ability include flamingos, some ducks like shovelers, and spoonbills. Probe the benthos for li...

El Salvador Maya temple - abandoned around 1200 AD, before the Spanish incursion. El Salvador has a long history of indigenous inhabitation.  Tazumal, the largest of the excavated sites, has 16 identified structures and a main pyramid that rises about 80 feet above the site's base.  I hiked around the site several times, climbed up as high as I was allowed, and photographed the site extensively. The area was only inhabited for 900 years or so by the Maya and later inhabited by Pipils until it was totally abandoned around 1200 AD.   The site was excavated beginning in 1942 and inaugurated in 1952.  The site was originally made with raw stone but was coated with concrete, which prevents it from being recognized by UNESCO.   Around the 5th century AD, the nearby volcano erupted, covering the area with ash and rock.  The site was abandoned for several generations and eventually reinhabited, where work continued.  This is not uncommon in El Salvad...

Click on image to see detail.  A larger image will show you what is going on. I had the pleasure of visiting Columbia's National Aviary yesterday while we were moored in Cartagena.  There I shot about 500 images (so thankful I'm not using film), most of which I have worked on in post, as today we are at sea.  One set of images was of Colombia's endemic masked owl.  It was so dark in the enclosure that I had to up my ISO to 25600 in order to shoot at a reasonable shutter speed. The upside to using such an ISO is that shutter speeds become functional, not producing blur from mild movements of the subject.  Intense motion requires faster speeds, often above 1/1000th of a second.  However, the owl was placid and was relatively calm. The downside is electronic noise, which you can see in the top left image.  Both images used the same degrees of correction, but the image on the left did not have denoising.  The right image used the denoising function of...

Same image.  A better image was taken when the condensation cleared.  See below. You know what condensation is.  A cold object comes into contact with warm, moist air, and tiny water droplets start to form on it.  You see the result on your iced drinks all the time, and on your eye glasses when you come in from the cold. Unfortunately, cameras and lenses suffer from the same fate.  I was reminded of this while cruising western Middle America.  I would bring my cool camera from my stateroom out on deck to photograph birds or dolphins or something of the sort, and my first images would be foggy.  In fact, the viewscreen could be so fogged up that either the camera's focusing system wouldn't work or I couldn't see what I was trying to photograph. There is a solution, but not one of convenience.   The easiest solution is to bring your equipment into the warm, moist environment before it is time to shoot.  You may think that keeping it in a b...

King vulture as photographed at the National Aviary of Colombia.  The photo above is of a King vulture; I took it while visiting the National Aviary of Colombia yesterday.  The vultures I am familiar with include the turkey vulture, which we have in Canada, and the black vulture, which is found in and south of Texas latitudes.  By comparison, the king vulture is beautiful. That beauty could easily be undermined if you happened to see one with its head deep inside the bowels of some recently dispatched animal.  And it's not like you would have one in your home; its 6 foot wingspan would likely be a nuisance, especially with its hurricane-force winds when beaten.  And it could be very unhappy once you are all out of carrion.  There's nothing more compelling to go shopping than a very large bird looking at you as if you'd be a pleasant snack. I suppose that you could say it is a pretty bird, from the neck up, as long as it wasn't covered in entrails.  I c...

Great frigatebirds, male and female, above our ship in the Panama Canal. Not to be confused with magnificent frigatebirds, great frigatebirds are a touch smaller, although they come in with wingspans surpassing two meters.  The wings of all frigatebirds are amazing structures, giving a surface area to weight ratio greater than any other living bird species. Their silhouette is unmistakable.  They are seen in tropical waters around the world's oceans.  Their narrow, bent wings, short necks, and long tails that are V-shaped identify them immediately.  I have seen them only twice, both times on cruises, once in the Caribbean and once in the Pacific near Middle Male frigatebirds have the large red throat that you may know about, the females do not.  They all eat marine creatures such as fish, squid, and crustaceans.  They pick these morsels from the water's surface but aren't above harrassing other birds to give up their bounty.  Their aggressive behaviour...