If you haven’t been out driving around the countryside shame on you. There is so much to see right now! The fall colors have been spectacular everywhere, in the towns as well as in the countryside. In fact my lady friend and I have been seeing more super foliage in the towns than on a lot of our evening“touring” drives. There have been a lot of migrating geese pulling in, as well as ducks, adding to the fall atmosphere.
So what have I been up to? Taking too many photos, of course. I’m often asked what I like to photograph. My answer is “anything that catches my eye” and right now everything seems to be catching it.
I have been spending a few hours every morning at one of the local marshes trying to capture images of a trumpeter swan family and, of course, all the geese moving into the area. I know the trumpeter swan family as the “K-93 family” because about 10 years ago the male swan showed up alone on the Tonawanda Wildlife Management Area, from a swan restoration project in Ontario, Canada, wearing yellow wing tags that read K-93. The following year he returned with a female, and they have had returned to the Alabama Swamps every year since then to raise their young.
Some K-93 offspring have also been returning and for the past few years a pair of them have also been reproducing. This year the K-93 pair produced eight young but only four survived and are now fully grown. Snapping turtles (of which there are way too many now) take a lot of young waterfowl. I personally have witnessed them taking young swans.
So, every morning I wait at this particular marsh for the K-93 family to show up, in hope of getting flight shots of them. Another adult pair with no young have showed up in the same area, as have a pair with one yearling. The K-93 adults are very territorial, so fights break out when these other swans show up at “their” marsh. They go right after the other swans and often drive them out — which gives me great opportunities for fight and flight shots.
While waiting for this swan action I’m entertained by a lot of migrating geese dropping into the same marsh. I was once an avid goose hunter and I am still excited by them tumbling out of the sky near me, so I’m always trying to catch them in their crazy flights as they prepare to land. Believe it or not, they sometimes fly upside-down. Sometimes while coming in to land, they twist and tumble — this cuts air drag and helps them drop more quickly — and that’s how they end up flying upside-down. It’s normal to see several doing that at the same time, but hard to catch with my camera as it’s a split-second thing and I’m never sure when they’re going to do it. So I take lots of shots, and numerous times recently I have lucked out.
While playing the waiting game, I’m surprised by what else I encounter in this particular marsh.
Ospreys have long since headed south, but one of this year’s young apparently didn’t get the word about winter coming, and occasionally I see him hunting nearby. One morning an adult bald eagle came buzzing by, chasing an immature eagle from his territory. Another day (probably) the same eagle perched in nearby tree and gave me some great shots.
Another day I spotted a white bird coming towards me from the distance, and I thought maybe it was a great egret, but when I put my camera on it and it got close enough I saw that it was a snow goose, a bird not normally seen around here. Several days later a pair of snow geese dropped in, traveling with a flock of Canada geese.
Occasionally some sandhill cranes stop by. Those big birds, with their erratic calls, always give me a thrill, not to mention great flight shots.
The other morning, as I sat waiting for some activity, I spotted a small, whitish bird perched on cattails nearby. As I put my camera on it, I discovered it was a shrike, a white-and-light gray bird about the size of a blue joy that is also uncommon here. Shrikes are interesting. They catch and eat insects, small mammals (mice and the like) and small birds; they hunt and act like small hawks and have a slightly hooked upper bill to help tear apart their food; and when they have more food than they can eat immediately, the males are known to impale the extras on tree parts for later consumption.
Now that it’s November, my advice to you is: Turn off that TV and get out there to see some real shows. And don’t just buzz around. Spend some time in one spot and have patience. You will be surprised what shows up.