Sunday, May 18, 2008

ok, here's one for you

Late yesterday afternoon I did finally make it to the refuge for a little birding. The wind was fierce. Anyway, I was sitting on a tree stump that had washed up on the Sandy Point Beach when I spotted something pale moving on the wet sand. Aha! I got the binoculars on it and watched the lone piping plover foraging. I keep hoping to witness one eating one of those big worms, but this guy was getting only small stuff.

As I watched, two photographers approached it. It moved down the beach and stopped. They followed it. It moved down the beach and stopped. They followed it. This went on for several iterations. I even started to feel anxious on its behalf. I couldn't really judge how close they were to the plover. From where I was it looked like about 6 feet. They had HUGE lenses, so I'm not sure why they needed to be so close. Anyway, they eventually walked off down the beach in search of other photo ops and the plover resumed feeding.

I watched it for a long time. Every once in awhile it made the peep-lo call. As always, unlike Thoreau, I did not find the sound dreary.

I took this picture from really far away with 12x optical zoom and then used the 10x digital zoom to, well, zoom in, on the tiny bright spot in the middle of the frame. Considering how far away I was, it's not bad.

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