A Day of Travel and Photography

From my first blog over the new year.  It is a description of a day of traveling, birding and photography.  I met my friend, Kathleen, a fellow birder and photographer at Starbucks, and then we left For Duxbury Beach.  We arrived at the beach at about 7:40 AM and slowly started the drive down toward Gurnet.  The skies was filled with clouds, so light was poor.  Half-full way between the 2nd and 3rd crossover, there was a white object on the fence.  It was the snowy owl.  We pulled to the side of the road and photographed the owl from inside and just outside the car.  Because of the poor light, we needed to bump the ISO high in order to capture the photographs..  I was at first, using my 500 mm lens, supporting it on the window with a Puffin Pad. I then lent my lens to Kathleen to utilize, since her long lens was too slow to get a sharp picture.  I then utilize my Sigma 300 mm f 2 .8 lens, which allowed me to capture the owl when it spread its wings, prior to flight. After the owl flew back down the beach, we traveled up to the beginning of Gurnet to see if we could find any other owls.  However, there were none and so we slowly started backtracking down the road.  On the beach side of the High Pines in a dead tree, we again found the owl and were able to get some photographs of it, prior to it jumping lower and behind the branches.  We then cross over onto the beach and looked down at the High Pine area with the binoculars and we could see the owl.  So we went back to the car and drove to the crossover and in four-wheel drive slowly drove down the beach to the owl, but because of the Sun's position, Kathleen could only obtain a back lit subject.

After leaving Duxbury Beach, we traveled down to Plymouth Harbor to see if we could locate, the Iceland Gull.  As we are driving into the parking lot, my SUV was attacked by a large flock of rock pigeons they landed on the car and peering in the front window.  They were looking for food.  We were able to locate the Iceland gull and it posed for us.  This was a life bird for Kathleen.

We finished the morning at Jenney' Pond, where we photographed the Lesser Black-Backed Gull,

a female Hooded Merganser and I obtained some flight shots of a Belted Kingfisher. That finished the morning and we returned back to home.

In the late afternoon, my son and I travel down to Sachuest National  Wildlife Refuge in Middletown, Rhode Island, hoping to obtain photographs of raptors and hopefully Short-Eared Owls.  However, neither raptors or owls appeared, but the deer started slowly coming out of the woods to feed in the meadow. I obtained a picture of a nice buck in the golden light. 

 

 

 

 

The afternoon finished off with a gorgeous sunset.