Wakodahatchee Wetlands, FloridaI spent a Shabbos in Miami visiting my elderly great-aunt, and was able to steal away for a few hours to shoot some birds.
Wakodahatchee is a bird photographer's dream - tremendous amount of birds, some of them hanging out extremely close, and lots of easy access. I lucked out that it was breeding season, so the birds were showing off their best colors and plumage.
My Nikon D850 and 500mm f/4 lens set up right next to a tree packed with wood storks. They were close enough to touch, but their foot-long beaks made me think the better of it:
Wonder why it's called the wood stork?
Cattle egret:
One of the weirdest birds there is the anhinga, often called the snake bird. This particular fellow was having a bad hair day:
Drying his wings after diving for fish:
Tricolor heron:
Common grackle:
Glossy ibis:
There's a certain image I've wanted to take for many years: a great white egret in full breeding plumage, displaying in front of a dark background. Conditions had never worked out, but I knew that today the stars were aligned: the egrets were in full mating dress, and there were a ton of them around - now all I needed was a bit of luck.
So I consequently spent a lot of time hanging out with the egrets, capturing them doing their thing and hoping one would strike the pose I wanted.
I saw egrets preening...:
...egrets screaming at nobody in particular...:
...egrets collecting nesting material...:
...but no egrets displaying.
Until I eventually found a solitary egret off on a tree, perfectly lit up but with the background in the shade - exactly the conditions I wanted! So I parked myself in front of him and waited. And waited, and waited.
Until suddenly out came a female, up came the feathers, and click went my camera:
And that was that.