If anybody’s wondering, I’ve been very busy this past month and this is the first chance to sit down and post something. Late October I did a slide show presentation on Shorebirds for the Queens County Bird Club. On the 24th of November I’ll be doing another one for North Shore Audubon Society. This one will combine shorebirds and wading birds. Preparation for these shows is quite time consuming.
I’ve given several private classes on Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom. If you’re interested, please get in touch with me. You’ll find my contact info above.
Of course, I’ve been in the field photographing what I can but there haven’t been that many opportunities. Since my last post I’ve only shot six days. Fortunately, on those days, I was able to get some decent stuff. Hammonasset State Park in Connecticut had a very cooperative Hudsonian Godwit that at times was so close you’d have to back up. Jones Beach was a different story. Sandy and I spent several hours there and remarked at how unbelievably slow it was. Suddenly there was an American Kestrel perched and an hour later a Merlin sitting, eating a Dark-eyed Junco. That made the day. On another day David Speiser and I went looking for sparrows and instead wound up at the beach. It was high tide and the water breached the shore and created tide pools. Shorebirds flocked to the pools and besides for the usual Dunlin, Sanderling and Black-bellied Plover, we were treated to close to 200 Red Knot. It’s always great see this endangered species but to see this many at one time was exciting. A few days later we went back to the beach but there weren’t any tide pools. Still, there were many shorebirds and while scanning through one of the flocks I found a Purple Sandpiper. In my 25 years of birding I’ve never seen one on the beach. I’ve only seen them on jetties. The moral to this story is don’t take things for granted. You never know what you’ll see or photograph just by looking.