Post Your Own Wildlife Photography

[crazyfingers]

More wildlife kinda pulled chronologically but I've been skipping around too. The folder has around 1000 photos of wildlife that I thought were good enough to have in one place. A lot fewer are worth posting here.

These two are Greater Yellow Legs. It feeds while wading into the water and eating small creatures. This flew in while I was standing on an island I kayaked to on Frenchman Bay, Maine



More Common Loon. This top one is probably on one of Acadia's lakes or ponds but it could be off the coast from our house or over at Schoodic. Anyway, the hard thing about photographing loon is to be able to see their eyes. The second photo does. They have red eyes.



Common Mergansers. A mother with a juvenile. The mother always takes care of the kids. It's really rare to see a male. These photos are probably on either Eagle Lake or Jordan Pond at Acadia. I could look at that date to see where we were then but not worth it.



A nice big snapping turtle on a rock in the north side of Eagle Lake in Acadia.


Harbor seal. They are all around the Frenchman Bay This could likely be from the shore at the house.


Wild Turkey chicks. Smaller than a pigeon. But they can fly. In my back yard.


A great Blue Heron just landed. This is at a cove along Schoodic Road

 

[crazyfingers]

Song birds and similar for a change

Blue Jays aren't really song birds. More related to crows. But they have a large vocabulary or sounds and are pretty.



Female Norther Cardinal


Male northern cardinal


Northern Mocking bird


Palm warbler


Female and male Eastern Bluebirds


Gray catbirds. They sing nonstop for hours with various tunes from other birds all randomized and strung together.


A Yellow Warbler


Tree Swallow

 

[spikepipsqueak]

I don't often envy others' wildlife, and I get all out of sorts about introduced species, but I'm prepared to make an exception for that woodpecker.

 

[crazyfingers]

The Pileated woodpecker?

Mondays and Wednesdays I take my son to the community college for his class. Golf course with trees, big lake. But I'm still finding the most birds right where I park down a gas line trail.

Today I got some pretty mediocre photos but I was good to get back into this. It was mostly cloudy. Sunny days are better.

It's hard when they are in bushes to get the focus on the bird and not a twig.

Carolina Wren


White Throated Sparrow


Blue Jay


Mourning Dove

 

[crazyfingers]

More pictures from around 2014ish

Red squirrel with a pine cone. Probably in Maine


Sharp Shinned Hawk on a car through my basement window.


Prairie Warbler at the park


A baby red squirrel at Schoodic Point


Bluebird feeding time


A Common Loon grooming itself


Osprey on the wire at Mud Creek


Common Mergansers can paddle really fast and when they do it as a group it's loud


Belted Kingfisher on the hover before diving for the fish


A Bonaparte’s Gull. The only one I've ever seen. At the shore in Maine.

 

[crazyfingers]

Out at the park today while my son was in class.

Ring Neck Ducks (no idea who thought that was a good name) There were around 50 of them. Migrating north.


Eastern bluebird.

 

[crazyfingers]

More from my wildlife photos

Two American Crows looking a the people


American Crow looking at me


Northern Mockingbird


Common Merganser chicks


Eastern Bluebird


Gray Catbird


Black Guillemot. He's tiny but dives for fish


Semipalmated Plover


Redwing Blackbird


Northern Cardinal

 

[crazyfingers]

A few days ago this Northern Flicker showed up in my yard.

I took these photos through the window and it's raining out.





Next morning the rain had turned to snow and the Northern Flicker was still here.

Norther Flickers are woodpeckers that don't peck wood. They fuss around on the ground for bugs.
They really love ant colonies.

 

[crazyfingers]

Out today while my son was in class.

European Starling


The Eastern Bluebirds were out




Really big one on the way to Logan Airport


I saw a movement in a mound of dirt and prickers.

Groundhog. It's really hard to get focus on something so deeply inside the sticks


He's right at his hole

 

[Shadowy Man]

This Coopers Hawk (I think) alit on our patio railing a couple months ago.

 

[crazyfingers]

Looks like a Cooper's Hawk. They are really hard to tell apart from Sharp Shinned Hawks.

 

[crazyfingers]

Today was the end of a 3 day nostalgia trip to Umass Amherst.

On the library tower, here is a Peregrine Falcon. It's only my second sighting of one.



I noticed a bunch of bird poop on the library tower. The falcon is there on the top pooped on window.



Here is where I took the photos. You can just see the spike that the falcon was sitting on at the top of the bird poop. The bird left


But I was able to get a photo of it leaving. I left around noon and don't know if it came back.

 

[crazyfingers]

Also out at UMass last week there are mallards and Canadian Geese in the campus pond. They are very used to people. They just do their thing.



I don't know exactly why these three male mallards are doing this. I suspect it's a male dominance thing though and not sex. The mallard on the right has a mate but the one on top is on a mission to dominate the one on the bottom. The one on the side seems to agree with the attacker.



It's interesting how the one on top is jabbing it's bill in the back of the other ones neck.








When not actually fighting they did a lot of this waddling around with the attacker in the middle.

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

An osprey visited the pond behind our house Tuesday. Luckily, it needed a few tries to snag lunch, so I was able to grab the camera. Unfortunately, a tree got in the way at the end.

 

[crazyfingers]

It's been a while since I've seen more than tree sparrows and robins at the state park I go to when my son is in class.

Today was much more interesting

This great blue heron was 450 feet away measured in Google Earth.


Common grackle. Reeds and flooded water bushes


Black water snakes. (Harmless) These were very interesting to watch as the big one climbed onto the dead reeds first and then the smaller ones came up. I may look into the behavior of black water snakes









Northern cardinal maybe 100 feet away


I enjoy being below the final approach to Boston Logan. These are still a few thousand feed up.

 

[crazyfingers]

An osprey visited the pond behind our house Tuesday. Luckily, it needed a few tries to snag lunch, so I was able to grab the camera. Unfortunately, a tree got in the way at the end.
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That was a great Osprey photo sequence. What kind of camera do you use?

I love Osprey. As my avatar suggests. Very cool bird

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

An osprey visited the pond behind our house Tuesday. Luckily, it needed a few tries to snag lunch, so I was able to grab the camera. Unfortunately, a tree got in the way at the end.
View attachment 42878View attachment 42879View attachment 42880View attachment 42881

That was a great Osprey photo sequence. What kind of camera do you use?

I love Osprey. As my avatar suggests. Very cool bird

I have a Canon 60D, a nice “prosumer”-grade camera that gives pretty good results despite being a couple generations old technologically. The lens I used for that sequence is a Canon 70-200 f/4, their entry-level professional-grade lens. Not long enough for most wildlife work, but if the bird is going to perform 50 feet away, it does the job.

There are a lot of nesting platforms for the osprey in this area, and two national wildlife refuges, so there’s a significant population. When we moved here, we were in a condo for a few months, and on our first morning, we woke up and found an osprey perched on the balcony.

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

I love the snake photos. I like seeing the garter snakes around our yard; wife is significantly less enthusiastic.

 

[Elixir]

I love the snake photos. I like seeing the garter snakes around our yard; wife is significantly less enthusiastic.

+1
It escapes me how some people “don’t like” snakes. I don’t particularly like them as people, but they are beautiful animals and generally beneficial. We have bull snakes and garter snakes, and supposedly rattlers, but I have never seen one here, which I put down to the bull snakes.

 

[hurtinbuckaroo]

Had a nice walk at Prine Hook National Wildlife Refuge yesterday.

Snowy egret


Great blue heron catching a fish


Great blue heron with fish


Forster’s(?) tern