This is another image that reminds me of the day I photographed it and the great memories of that photo session. Ron and I sat with this Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax) for several minutes on the auto tour loop of Bear River National Wildlife Refuge in Box Elder County, Utah.
My Nikon D300 is giving me the fits, I’ve had it checked out locally and they can’t replicate the issues I am having of the exposure going wonky intermittently, my shutter speed will go from 1/1000 or higher and then drop to 1/4 to 1/60 resulting in pure snowy white images. Yuck. At any rate right now I am using my backup D200′s until I can get the D300 sent to Nikon.
The day didn’t start off looking great, it looked like it might be cloudy but the light stayed over the refuge while to the south it didn’t look great. There were birds, birds and more birds on the auto tour loop and we were able to catch some wonderful action.
This heron was standing on a little spit of dry land at the edge of a marshy pond, for a bit it just stood there, then it preened a while. Before too long Ron and I could see the bird was going to lift off and fly away. We were ready!
I took a nice series of images as the Black-crowned lifted off and flew past us, I really liked the position of the wings, the look at the intensely red eye and those big, dangling yellow feet in this frame.
After leaving the refuge we stopped at the Maddox Drive In for great Hamburgers and fries.
Birthday Boy Ron appeared to have an awesome day but why wouldn’t we? Great light. Plenty of birds. Super company. I was a happy camper!
Mia McPherson, OntheWingPhotography.com
Mia McPherson
Mia McPherson is a nature lover, wildlife watcher and an avian photographer. Mia first become serious about bird photography when she moved to Florida in 2004. Her recent move to the Salt Lake area of Utah was a great opportunity to continue observing their behavior and photographing them. With so many birds species there easily accessible it wasn’t long before she was hooked. By learning more about each species, she can anticipate their behaviour and create opportunities to obtain ever better images of those species.
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