White Egret – Romance and the Egg

♥

Besides getting to see the Great Blue Heron chicks doing so well last Sunday, other species were very active also. It was a busy day at the rookery!! White Egrets are inherently lovely and always welcome in any photographer’s view finder. And, so it was that I was able to observe, at a location I believe vacated by  some Great Blue Herons, a pair of nesting White Egrets! Initially, the mating pair pictured in this post tried to mate but were rudely interrupted by the arrival of a third egret who seemed to want to break things up. Bird hormones can run rampant as much as any species! The images I am showing here are part of a mating sequence later in the day. I can’t think of any creature that looks more pure and gentle going about this process than the bird with the beautiful bridal train of white aigrettes. Ironic that once upon a time the very plumes meant to attract a mate were the very thing that nearly caused their extinction when they were killed in their nests to provide fancy decorations for ladies hats!!  Since the ornamental breeding feathers begin to fall off shortly after the arrival of chicks, the plume hunters wanted them at their prime of beauty!

♥

White Egrets Tending their first baby blue egg. Blue must be the most common of egg shell colors among various heron species as all the eggs I’ve seen so far are indeed blue.

Keeping house!!

Then he makes his move!!

♥

♥

♥

♥

♥

And now we know the answer to the proverbial question, “What came first–the Egret or the Egg? 

——

Vicariously (I mean scientifically) yours,

Judy

Three Amigos at the Rookery!

♦

♦

I have been suffering from a serious rotator cuff tear causing quite a bit of discomfort  (she said putting it mildly !!)   My last foray to my favourite nesting colony, I paid for dearly in set back on healing. Who knew that camera holding nails that exact spot where I had the tear!!  So, being a reluctantly good patient, I’ve restrained myself from any visits since I cannot stand to go without my camera. I just feel naked without it and don’t know what to do with myself. I suppose that kind of kills the …go into the wild to slow down and commune with nature…methodology. I can’t bear see a good scene and not want to capture it.  The wonderfully talented, Lisa Brunetti of Zeebra Designs,  says an artist’s eyes never rest! She is so right! But, artist or not, I can’t stop looking and surely cannot pass up a good composition….or maybe even a not so good composition!! I am truly doomed!!  

All that to say that I was so glad to finally be able to visit again this past Sunday!! I had so much been wanting to see how the Great Blue Heron nest I was following earlier in the season had fared with the pair’s second clutch. See previous posts here and here about the loss of the first chicks when they were about a week old.  

I was actually somewhat amazed by the surge of pleasure I had seeing the nest had not one or two but three handsome and healthy chicks about two months old standing in a little crowd atop a nest getting far to small for them. Soon they will be foraging for fish on their own!   Any kind of emotional attachment was unplanned but I guess the pair having to start over, I wished for success! 

 Please find below just a few selected pictures of this second brood. Eggs are not laid at the exact same time so the first to hatch generally becomes the dominant presence in the nest. I think you can see who is dominant in this one!!

 

♦

A little crowd unto themselves!!

They say families that preen together, stay together!!

The sunning postures start much earlier in the life of a bird than I had realized!! The dominant nestling takes the front position.

Dominant chick clearly in evidence!!

 

♦

Hurray for second chances!!

 

Judy

A Golden Gator & Genetic Memory

♦

So often when I visit a rookery or a refuge to photograph birds someone will stop and ask me where the alligators are. Seems the average sightseer is a great deal more interested in the primitive lizards than their lovely feathered neighbors.  I guess a certain childlike fascination with ancient lifeforms is undeniable! After all, part of what draws me to the swamp is that it is a time portal I want to walk through.  Who can really enter into the subdued light beneath a stand of cypress trees and not feel a surge of curiosity or anticipate the discovery something undefined but oddly familiar?   Maybe we can just chalk it up to some sort of Jungian genetic memory?  We are only remembering a world encoded into our genome; a world which we are never really ready to relinquish or relegate to insignificance despite the fact we spend our days in the air conditioned space between four walls!   Oh my gosh, if Jurrasic Park were real. I have to confess, I’d clone the dinosaur DNA myself!!  For many of us the sight of the tough hide and disinterested gaze of  our local lizard, Alligator mississippiensis, is as close as we will get to the ancient call of the forest primeval!

The golden gator is the result of some filter play and I thought my favourite gator scene and gator faces below help give a textural sense to Big Cypress and the Big Lizards! All were taken in the Big Cypress Preserve area off of the Tamiami Trail near Ochopee.

♦

More than any other gator picture I have taken, this one took me right through that portal out of my time, place and space.  Sometimes a scene is just a gift and this was one of those times….light streaming through the cypress dome filtered by evocative spanish moss onto an alligator so perfectly posed and reflected that I could not have wished for more.

Alligator’s actually have two types of eyelids. The eyelids shown above are of skin and close top to bottom like a human’s. I’ve always liked the ruffly edge that the upper lids have in Alligators. The other eyelid is the protective nictitating membrane which covers then eye when the gator swims and allows clear vision. 

This friendly specimen is just having a lovely time sunning among the wildflowers. Another feature of the eye that seems a bit different in each individual is the folds around the eye opening which for some reason I find attractive.

◊

“Among the scenes which are deeply impressed on my mind, none exceed in sublimity the primeval forests undefaced by the hand of man…….. no one can stand in these solitudes unmoved, and not feel that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body.”

 

Charles Darwin

◊

Ever,

Judy

Soaring

♦

♦

So far I haven’t had the patience to concentrate on, let alone master the art of bird flight photography. Getting what I call ‘wings up’ captures as birds land in a rookery or as they posture with wings spread in defence of territory, is not the same as flight photography. I greatly admire those wildlife photographers who are accomplished at this and seriously regret that I get so distracted that I let opportunities go unanswered and untried. So this image is truly serendipity!! The day was getting on with late day light still shooting horizontally across the landscape from the west. Purple shadows though already clung to the foliage carpeting the wetland below.  While I did have my camera at the ready, the Great Blue Heron flying by was so unexpected that I was simply lucky to frame and focus before it passed me by. The majestic wing beat over the wetland was like a manta ray gliding over watery sea grasses…gently and with all the time in the world…for just a moment before disappearing into the distance and creating a desire to fly along with it.

An image from the month of April, its hues of purple and green remind me of Spring.

♦

“The desire to fly is an idea handed down to us by our ancestors who…looked enviously on the birds soaring freely through space…on the infinite highway of the air.”
-Wilbur Wright

Louisiana Heron Chicks

♦

Louisiana Herons (Egretta tri-color) are surely the daintiest and most lady- like in appearance of the herons and egrets. Audubon referred to this lovely species as the’ Lady of the Waters’ for its delicacy of movement and wonderful color. Their chicks however must surely be the most rambunctious of all the heron chicks!! They are my very favourite to watch scampering like monkeys up and down the branches with amazing agility. Beautiful green spring leaves are no match and  are left in tatters in their wake!! In fact it was watching the Louisian Heron chicks that made me appreciate something Audubon observed about the way trees grow which are home to nesting birds season after season. The trees become stunted kind of like  Banzai trees as the birds tear up the leaves and upper branches disturbing apical dominance. And so the trees of a rookery do seem oddly cultivated by the annual avian rough and tumble!! If I had not seen what they do I would not have appreciated what Audubon noted.

The chick above is rushing out onto a single unsupported branch like a tightrope walker or maybe a balance beam gymnast!!

Like a human toddler learning to walk and throwing out its arms to balance, this tri-color chick does the same. Hanging on by its toes, wings thrown forward in a balance check and its youthful spiky head feathers blurred by the sudden jolt !

Having regained composure it races off branch to branch.

Companionable chicks having a nice late afernoon chat while waiting for the parental dinner train.

Are the parents ever prepared for the rush when they land near their ravenous brood? It’s always a chase!!

Sometimes the chicks prevail and sometimes they get all tangled up into a bird ball with each other in the rush of things!

And sometimes they prevail and successfully grab the parents beak for a nice pre-digested snack!

Here uncouth little guys just look adorably cute while their parent preens nearby!! The mating colors of the adult definitely earn it the name’ Lady of the Waters!’  The coppery aigrettes, ruby eyes and white head crests present during the breeding season are just exquisite!

And here we have the face of a fledgling with what remains of his youthful spiky hair do! He can fly and he knows it!!

♦

Hope you enjoy these adorably active avian toddlers!! There is a certain universality to how exhausting it is to keep up with the young ‘uns!!

Judy

Waves of One Ocean

♦

Doubt is not something I think of as sinful or wrong in a thoughtfully faithful person. I know that sounds contradictory but I’ve always felt that there was a necessary duality in so many aspects of life, science and belief which we need for definition. How are you to know well being if you’ve never been sick or the beauty of light without the darkness? I’ve always had the idea that we humans are incapable of appreciating  the joys around us if there were no sorrows; or light if not for shadow.  Understanding requires knowledge of both experiences. Otherwise it’s just academic. I know in the aftermath of a bad headache that ‘normal’ is practically euphoric  and how wouId I know that if not for pain? While these are lessons we may not seek out on a physical or psychological level, they are given to us nevertheless!

But, there was a time when I felt doubt was a sign of weakness or being imperfect and was something to struggle against. Why not blind faith after all?  Isn’t that the definition..belief in that which is unproven or unexperienced? After awhile though, I came think of doubt as a form of questioning , not unbelief and that in many ways faith stands upon the shoulders of its inquiry.  Doubt is a lot like wonder which leads us from an inkling of something beyond ourselves to a more resolved endpoint. Who planted the question, who crafted the inkling?

Some years ago,  I had long discussions about such matters with a friend who is of the Bahai faith. That religion has a very lyrical phrase in its literature which says “we are waves of one ocean, leaves of one tree.” While it may allude more to the shared experience or oneness of humankind, I saw in those waves of one ocean, the equal and opposite waveforms of crest and trough, light and dark, doubt  and faith. I felt the compelling and restless rhythm of the ocean, its rise and fall, its light and shadow! So on a particular stormy day around that time, I sat and wrote down a few thoughts about faith and doubt with the idea of forming them into a rhyming poem of some sort. While the wind gusted outside and lightning strobed the movements of wildly tossed tree limbs  into snapshots of abandon,  I felt gripped by gathering forces of something coming unseen and from far away.

◊

Waves of One Ocean

 

Winds of doubt gust across a vast sea of darkness.
Swells accumulate, combining to keep a soul in its grip.

 

Secretly, stealthily out of the mists of time,
comes confrontation with the Unknowable.

 

Ancient inklings of awareness beyond, await recognition.
Creation seeks its Creator.

 

Under the restless face of the sea, forces move,
gathering to disturb the dark.

 

Inexorably waves mount, crashing and crushing
the very soul of doubt upon its own dark shore.

 

Erasing even its traces with each urgent, liquid swirl.
Creating in those traceless sands a pristine canvas for faith.

 

Winds of faith gust across a vast sea of light.
Swells accumulate, combining to keep a soul in its grip.

 

JAL 8/9/03

◊

And so that is the back story behind the poem  which never got beyond the thought stage into the rhyming stage but simply remained as it was on that stormy afternoon. The images below (and the one above) are of exactly the same beach, waves of the same ocean, with the dual gloom of a gathering powerful storm and a brilliantly hued rainbow!!

♦

Hope you might enjoy life in all its various moods and states of being!!

Judy

Avian Portraits

♦

Today just wanted to take advantage of the rainy day in between stints of laundry to play with some bird pictures. I wanted to simply combine some texture for an artistic feel with the bird portraits and yet in a natural context. The two images below are of a Green Heron and a Cattle Egret. As always I have more thoughts than I can effectively carry out but hope you enjoy these anyhow!

♦

The Green Heron is sometimes called the Green-Backed Heron. In this late day light you can see how the back plumage takes on a greenish hue.  This image shows the layers of feather texture of this small heron with the greenish blue back plumage, then the brownish layer with light  edging, and beneath feathers with gray green colors. The neck of course is a rusty brown with dark crest feathers which highlight with bluish green in the light.

Cattle Egret with pretty seasonal aigrettes makes a fine profile with white and orange against the branches and green leaves.

♦

 

April showers bring May flowers!! And, my grass is very happy with today’s rain and I’ve enjoyed the thunderous punctuation!!

Judy