This site is dedicated to wildlife and landscape photography.
This site is dedicated to wildlife and landscape photography.
This immature bald eagle has monofilament fishing line caught in both of its feet. The artificial bait (shrimp) is still attached to the line. This is a recipe for disaster. At some point the line is going to get snagged on a limb or other object and, unless the bird figures out how to remove it, the bird is going to die. Unfortunately, fishing lines kill a lot of birds and other wildlife.
I think that most everyone who has an interest in wildlife knows that when a bald eagle sees an osprey flying with a fish the bald eagle will chase and harass the osprey and get it to drop the fish (which the eagle then dives for and catches). The osprey gives up at this point so it can live and fish another day.
What people may not be as aware of is that bald eagles do this to each other too and if one loses the fish it doesn’t give up. The aerial dog fights can go on for a long time and they can be quite spectacular. Changes of possession can become numerous because when one dives on the other the one with the fish usually opens its talons to defend itself and loses the fish in the process. This results in a dive by both eagles to be the first to catch the falling fish. It gets even ore interesting when the fight takes place where numerous eagles gather. They all get involved.
I’ve seen some interesting things happen in these dogfights. I’ve seen one or both crash into the water. Sometimes they can get airborne from the water, but sometimes they can’t and they then try to get to land. If they don’t make it to land before hypothermia, they die.
This is one of the more unusual photos I’ve taken of bald eagles fighting. One eagle has his talons into the upper tail of the other and is flying along carrying the other, but they are losing altitude. Sorry, I don’t remember how it ended.
About this time each year I think of the trips I used to make in March to photograph bald eagles around Homer, Alaska. It was always a fantastic experience. This photo was taken in Sadie Cove which is on the far side of Kachemak Bay from Homer.
This photo was taken on February 22 near Pierce Point Ranch. The bull is sporting a pretty impressive 7-point rack. He won’t have those big antlers for long though. I saw one of the Limantour herd bulls with only one antler that day. It looks like antler-dropping season has begun. Last year I posted a photo of a bull on February 15 whose antlers were gone and new antler growth was already quite visible. To see that post click here.
Collecting antlers is illegal. That doesn’t stop people though. Antlers sold on the black market are worth a fair amount of money. The Park Service goes out and tries to keep ahead of the collectors. You may wonder what the Park Service does with the antlers. The answer is that it grinds them up and puts them back in the areas where they found them because they are an important source of calcium and other minerals for rodents and other wildlife. For a photo of an elk with a deer antler in its mouth click here.
It’s too bad people won’t just leave them where they’ve fallen, but they won’t. As long as people want animal parts (tusks, horns, paws, teeth, gall bladders etc.), and are willing to pay for them, there will be people who will hunt for those parts even if it means killing the animals (which it usually does). Unfortunately, this is the way it’s always been.
I’ve recently begun photographing shorebirds at Point Reyes. I’ve looked for them twice at Drakes Beach and found sanderlings and marbled godwits there. Identifying some of them, such as the various sandpipers, is proving difficult. Also difficult is identifying what they eat. I’m not sure what this one has caught. My first guess was that it had a sand flea. However, a quick search taught me that it might be a mole crab. Of course, it could be neither of those. I’ll have to get better informed as I photograph more shorebirds.
This photo was taken last Saturday at 5:10PM, which was 35 minutes before sunset. As with the bluebird photo of a few days ago, there was a strong color cast caused by the low sun. This time I left the color correction for middle gray, but disabled the color correction for black/white. That’s the opposite of what I did with the bluebird. If I had left the correction for black/white the water would have been very blue. The color correction for middle gray was small and this looked slightly better to me.
If I like a photo enough to print or post on the web one of the first things I do to get it ready for use is a color correction step to identify any color casts. Actually, I do two steps. The first step neutralizes color casts in the blacks and whites and the second does that in the middle grays. Photos taken during normal daylight hours don’t normally have much of a color cast. However, there is usually some color cast and I almost always remove it. Of course, the time around sunrise and sunset is another story. I still do the color correction steps, but rarely remove the color cast caused by the sun being low in the horizon. To get that color cast is why we get out there so early and stay out there so late. This bluebird was photographed as the sun was disappearing below the horizon. I have not removed the color cast in the above image.
I thought it would be interesting to show what this photo looks like after neutralizing the color cast caused by the setting sun. Here’s the same photo as above, but with the color cast completely removed. The photo now looks “more normal” because we usually see bluebirds in normal daylight.
There is a third photo below. It looks more like the first photo, but it isn’t the exact same image. After I did the color correction steps described above I toggled the black and white correction and the middle gray correction on and off and found that I preferred the look of the image with black and white color corrected, but with middle gray not corrected. Note how the white breast compares in all three photos. Obviously, correcting for middle gray had the most effect. Personally, I think I prefer the third image.
