Got water? Got birds!

Wow! Until an hour ago, when I looked more carefully at my folder of water bird pictures, I was not aware that I had managed to catch a pelican in flight. As you can see, the timing could have been better; his beak was definitely not holding more than his belly can. Yes, we're back in Louisiana for this post, and while some of the same birds might be found at our local lakes in the right season, there are several I've never seen before! BTW, praise be for the 12x zoom on the Canon; otherwise, you wouldn't be seeing most of these pictures.

The laughing gull, it turns out, is an easy bird to photograph. He's quite aware that food is to be had where there are humans. Pieces of bread. Popcorn. Potato chips. All the good stuff that your mother warned you about.

We saw a lifetime worth of gulls while waiting for a ferry to carry Sson's vehicle across a waterway. With cars accumulating, food was being tossed left and right to a large crowd of wheeling and dealing birds.

Snowy egrets (above) and cattle egrets (below) were plentiful in and around the bayous.

At one site, Sson and I frightened a large flock of cattle egrets .

Not sure, but this looks like a great egret landing.

The zoom was stretched beyond its limit to capture this stilt and his reflection. Not a single one of the stilts came any closer than what my LH used to call bird distance -- a careful spacing that keeps all birds the same small size for the observing birder. A very frustrating critter to try to photograph.

Now this is a lovely bird that does not appear in any of my books of Western birds -- a little blue heron. Yes, we have great blue herons at every pond or watering hole that is an acre or so in expanse, but the pretty bird above was a new experience.

As was the white ibis crowd we found in a dead tree on one bayou excursion. Again --I've seen many black colored ibis locally during fly-through season, but never one of these spectacular critters.


One very lucky day, Sson and I spotted a flock of roseate spoonbills in a crawdad pond. The birds were stirring up the water to feed by moving their amazing beaks back and forth. Just take a look below; no question where the name originated.

This guy must be a juvenile heron of some sort. But ... no idea of which sort. Yes, that is him below, too.

Linkage: Warren at TouchWind has found an amazing bit of totally misguided desert landscaping down in Tucson ... Rich is offering an interesting group of surreal Prescott prints for sale at a new site.