Picture of the week

Egret on gold

Snowy egret and its reflection against a backdrop of reeds at the Yolo Wildlife Refuge under early morning light.  This was literally a golden opportunity given lighting along with the extremely still waters, lending to an almost perfect reflection.

This week features a sampling of bird oriented photography over the last month at the Yolo Wildlife Refuge and the American River Parkway.   An american bittern was spied trying to hide by being still in a vertical prone position against the reeds, as shown in the 2rd image below.

While on the parkway (as shown in the 3rd image below, I spied a red-shouldered hawk hunting for crawdads in the shallow waters just off the bank.  It would perch in a tree about 30 feet up, searching for them down in the water.  Then it would dive into the shallow section about 6" to 12" deep and pull out a crawdad, then subsequently eat on the bank of the river.

In the 4th image while exploring the bank of the river nearer to the Nimbus dam basin at dusk, I encountered two great blue herons doing a mating dance.  Not having a tripod, I was forced to capture this handheld.  Incredibly this was captured while resting the camera on my knee at 1/20th of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 6400 using a Canon 7Dmk2 and 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6 at 400mm.  The image stabilization on this lens continues to amaze me.