Terns are hard to photograph, especially if you’re trying to shoot from a moving boat during a rainstorm. I wanted to get a dive just as it was entering the water, but this is the best I managed that is still recognizable as a tern.
Category Archives: Bird
Peru 2015 – Barbet
The problem with birds with black heads is that you can never tell whether or not they were part in shadow.
Peru 2015 – Caracara
Caracara closing an agreement with a dragonfly with a handshake.
This may not be in humanity’s best interest.
Peru 2015 – Kingfisher
Really? Another kingfisher?
Maybe I took too many shots of these guys.
White-naped Crane (Grus vipio)
The white-naped crane has evolved protective camouflage to blend in with the setting sun.
It’s not very effective.
Peru 2015 – Great Egret
Egrets project an invisible disrupter beam them as they fly. They vibrates the matter below them, stunning fish so they float to the surface. A flock of egrets can stun an entire lake at a time, and is one of the reason they fly in a “V” formation.
Peru 2015 – Cocoi Heron
Have you ever taken a really good look at a bird’s feet?
Siberian Crane (Leucogeranus leucogeranus)
Apparently you can get feathers wrapped around your tongue while preening.
Peru 2015 – Kingfisher
Geez. Another kingfisher. Sure are a lot of them in Peru.
Siberian Crane (Leucogeranus leucogeranus)
Before I went to Peru, I decided to my new lens on a few test runs. This was my first trip to the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin. I wanted to go there because, in a single visit, I could see every species of crane that exists on the planet. Being able to test my lens was just a bonus.
Being able to see the texture on the iris of a crane was what made me think that I was probably going to keep that lens.
Peru 2015 – Black Collared Hawk
This is a photo of the tongue of a black collared hawk, conveniently still attached to the hawk itself.
Bird
When they get bashful, some birds hide behind themselves.
Peru 2015 – Great Egrets
They are of a feather, after all.
Cocoi Heron (Ardea cocoi)
There’s that sun pretending to be an off-camera flash again.
Hawk Headed Parrot (Deroptyus accipitrinus)
This is a hawk headed parrot eating a strawberry. Of course, the parrot doesn’t really have a hawk’s head. Accipitriformes and psittaciformes are two entire different orders of birds. Birds, of course, aren’t really birds. They’re avian dinosaurs. The word “dinosaur”, being coined in 1842 to mean “fearfully-great lizard”, of which the animals we call dinosaurs were most definitely not, at least on the “lizard” part. How great they were is rather subjective.
Also, a strawberry isn’t really a berry. It is an aggregate accessory fruit.
This post* brought to you by the English language.
* We now call a stream of electrons that make up words and/or pictures “posts” after the large wooden things we used to put into the ground for people to nail paper to. Thank you, linguistic evolution**.
** The word, “evolution”, of course coming from Latin and French, referring both to military maneuvers and the act of unrolling a scroll***.
*** Which, when unrolled, were sometimes nailed to posts*.
Peru 2015 – Cormant
“I got a fish! I got a fish!”
Peru 2015 – Anhinga
They call this bird the “snake bird”, presumably because they have large venomous fangs that they use to paralyze their prey while they gulp it down live through their distended jaws.
Peru 2015 – Kingfisher
Hope you’re not tired of kingfishers yet. There’s more coming.
Peru 2015 – Great Egret
It’s actually much easier to get shots like this in Peru than in Minnesota. This is partly because when I’m in Minnesota, I’m shooting against dimmer skies, but mostly because great egrets don’t live here.
Peru 2015 – Horned Screamer
It’s not really a horn, just a feather. It is also astonishingly difficult to photograph … especially if you want to get a bee in the same shot.