Osprey - oops, I was too eager for it to be something else.

I photographed this from our cabin balcony on the cruise ship.

Yes, it's an osprey.  But my previous post on this bird was for a peregrine falcon.  That's on me, I was clearly mistaken, and some of you pointed that out to me.  Thanks.

I guess I get excited when I see something like this.  Open ocean, nothing around but a few other birds using the ship as a moving landmass, and this great predatory beast cruising around the vessel in circles.  I should have known straight off that it was an osprey, but I was hoping it would be something else, maybe something exciting.

And so I pulled out my bird book (yes, I brought my bird book with me on the cruise) and went through trying to identify it.  I saw a subspecies of the peregrine falcon and, for some reason, decided that was it and claimed my find.  To make matters worse, I posted my claim, complete with photo, on Facebook and was soon humbled by my rather massive error.

The up side to the whole thing in that it was pretty neat having this large bird of prey not 20 feet from my cabin's balcony.  It made two passes, that I am aware of, and then disappeared from sight.  I never saw it again.  I think I took something like 50 photos of it; my shutter speed was a bit on the low side so there was significant blurring on many of them.  This one, however, turned out well.

It's a good photo of a peregrine osprey.  Don't you think?

Thanks for reading.

Eric Svendsen     www.ericpix.com