Well its been some time since I went on this trip (beginning of may!) but with one thing or another its taken ages to get a trip report online. I managed to see a real range of birds on this trip even though we only went looking for them on about 3 occasions during the trip, I think the final species count was 73 with pretty minimal effort.
Two birds I really wanted to see while in Florida were the snail kite and the Florida scrub jay, which is an endemic species. I managed to photograph them both whilst there and although I was happy with the results I would have liked more time to get a better shot of both.
Another bird I love to see while there is the osprey. They are fairly rare visitors to our shores, only coming to breed in certain locations, but in Florida they seem to be everywhere. Although I saw plenty of fishing by them I wasn’t close enough at any time to get a good shot of it this time. I did however get some in flight shots and one of the osprey post -fishing.
We were lucky to see a group of recently fledged purple martins too. They sat on telephone wires and waited to be fed insects by the parents. They are very fast in flight so it was a challenge to try and get pictures in focus and also to get photos of them feeding the juvenile birds.
Here are just a few of the other bird species I captured whilst around. Pictures are of a blue jay, cattle egret, great blue heron, juvenile limpkin and a tricolor heron.
My favourite shot from the trip however came from an unusual source. We visited a national park on the east coast and found a mudflat with hundreds of waders. One lesser yellowlegs was preening and eventually flapped its wings into mid air then landed again. I happened to be watching it at the time and caught this image.
Thanks for taking a look and as always love to get feedback on my photos so feel free to message me or leave a comment.
Nice blog. After four years of wildlife observation, I still haven’t photographed the scrub jay. Good for you.