Little Blue Heron, and More at Daniel Webster

Juvenile Little Blue Heron

This Sunday was a beautiful morning with a great sunrise.  As I traveled to Marshfield to visit Daniel Webster Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary.  The reason I traveled was because there have been reports of a juvenile Little Blue Heron present at the sanctuary.  Normally I have seen the juvenile Little Blue Heron down in Florida.  As opposed to the adult Little Blue Heron, the juvenile plumage is usually all white as opposed to the dark bluish-gray body that the adult has.

Arriving at the sanctuary, I walked down to the morning blind that overlooks the small pond.  The sanctuary has two blinds, a morning blind and an afternoon blind.  The blinds are positioned so the sun is coming over your shoulder and illuminating the creatures that are in front of you.  In the blind, there are screws that you can mount your tripod head on.  I set my gimbal head and attached my 500 mm F/4 lens starting out with a 1.4 converter and utilizing my Nikon D800.

Red-shoulder Hawk

The morning started out with a Hawk in the distance, and to capture it, I switched my converter to the 2X.  We then got a Green Heron closer was which required switching back to the 1.4 converter.  Later on, a Sandpiper appeared, which required the 2X converter plus changing the crop mode of my camera to 1.5, so that I could get a decent picture.  The question was, was this a Solitary Sandpiper or a Spotted Sandpiper.  After reviewing the pictures on my computer, there was no white notch before the wing, therefore, I called it a solitary Sandpiper.

Green Heron with its crest up

Solitary Sandpiper

This is a morning where I had to change from using converter's of various lengths to no converter's so that I get the photograph that I wanted.

All of a sudden, in front of us appeared the Little Blue Heron, which was so close that I almost had too much glass to take its picture.

Little Blue Heron

After finishing all of photography, I came home and downloaded the pictures and am thinking about returning again to Daniel Webster tomorrow.  The reason is that the plants and spiderwebs were covered with dew, and would make very interesting pictures.  The weather report is for fog in the morning so I hope we will get the great dew on the subjects.  This will require my macro lens, rather than my 500 mm lens.

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