The Real Beauty of Tree Swallows

This morning Brad & I headed to our favourite location to photograph Tree Swallows, Neville's Pond located just inside Paradise offers a little haven for these beautiful little birds. Each spring dozens of these swallows come to Neville's Pond to nest in the boxes we have scattered both around & in the pond.  These fast flying little birds spent almost all of their time in flight and even when perched they don't seem to sit long. That is until they begin to nest.

Once the males arrive they begin to check out all the available nest boxes and quickly claim territory. Once a mate is found the pair quickly gets the process of nest building underway. During this time period the pair spend most of their time hanging out around the box guarding it from other swallows who are relentless in trying to take over the box in the early season.

It is then that we place interesting looking perches such as the ones in these photos for the birds to land on. Then its just a waiting game until you get one or both of them on the stick!

So far 6 nest boxes have swallows guarding them, plus one more pair right in my back yard. Over the next few weeks almost all of the boxes all have swallows occupying them. These photo opportunities will not last long because once the nest has been constructed the female will spend most of her time in the box incubating eggs while the male busily feeds her. Expect more posts to come of how the Tree Swallows are doing and of course more photos!

Below are a few more of my favourite images from our morning session

Notice the wings back on look like a butterfly, this is the first time I've noticed this

A short clip of one of the nesting pairs

Purple Sandpipers at Cape Spear

Over the weekend brad and i decided to check out the purple sandpipers that winter annually at Cape Spear. When we arrived the sun was just starting to rise so we waited on the icy rocks and tried to spot the flock being flushed from the large waves. After a few minutes we spotted them flying by, and slowly made our way down to the waters edge which was coated in ice created by the salt spray.

The waves are so unpredictable at the cape making it extremely dangerous to shoot there on even good summer days, so what we do to be safer is one of use goes close to the water to shoot while the other is making sure there are no large waves coming and also looking for other birds in the distance such as dovkies, Black gullimonts, Common Eider and long tail ducks all of which we did see!

Its risky but we are extremely cautious and are willing to do what we have to the get the shot. As you can see we got some memorable shots!

This winter hit hard dumping a lot of snow fast, resulting in the birds to move elsewhere for shelter hopefully soon we will have more to share, expect a post about some feeder set-ups we have been thinking of and maybe some eagle close ups?

 

Eruption of snowy owls = Eruption of Excitement!

Over the last month or so there has been a major influx of snowy owls to the southeast coast of Newfoundland. The latest observations were numbering well over 100 and for birders and photographers alike there is a lot of excitement!

Snowy owls being the large raptors they are consume mostly rodents but in situations like this one they are likely to eat just about anything. One reason people think they may have come down from their high arctic habitats to Newfoundland is because the lemming population may be low this winter. Hopefully they find enough food. If they are willing to eat seagulls they will be fine for a LONG time around st.Johns. 

                                        
The sheer size and power of these big birds is amazing, when they lift off their massive feet hang bellow them like the landing gear on an air plane! This morning Brad and I were back at the cape. It was a great morning the sun was shining the air was cold and the snowy owl population at the cape had grown to a total of 13. When I crested one of the ridges along the east coast trail leading away from the cape all I could see were white dots along the barrens and each one was a snowy owl. I took my time and worked my way along the boardwalk watching for any owls that might be nestled down close to the trail sometimes one or even two would glide past me only a couple or feet off the ground and perch on a near by rock or hump. It really was a morning I will never forget.

                      

The picture above I captured as I crested one of the hills and happened to notice three owls drinking from a small pond. By the time I was near enough to get a half decent shot two of them had left but this one stayed and I watched it for four or five minutes as it drank and called to other near by owls.

With Christmas fast approaching you can expect to see a post about what the best gifts are for your photography enthusiast! And brad will share with you his Diving Duck Mission.

Winter has arrived 

Cape St.Marys Ecological Reserve!

As promised, Brad and I (Brendan) headed to Cape St.Marys for our annual spring trip to photograph some sea birds and horned larks. When we arrived at the cape (7:30) we got out of the car and it was similar to being in a wind tunnel.....WINDY! we had hoped for no rain or fog and lucky enough there was not any rain or fog but be had not planned on gale force winds... We had planned to use our Kiwk camo blinds and my Bluetooth speaker to photograph the Horned larks but we knew that the wind would simply blow our blinds away and with so much wind the larks probably couldn't hear the speaker anyways. But we did get a couple shots, not the quality we were hoping for but at least its something !

After we scraped the idea of photographing larks we headed over to bird rock which as you can see from the picture below is home to hundreds of nesting gannets for the next few months. The over cast day was the type of lighting we needed to get the exposures of the white birds just right.

 

 

              While at the cape we were able to see multiple birds of prey including many eagles, a peregrine falcon and what we believe to be a Gyrfalcon ! With such a concentration of nesting birds its easy to see why these raptors would hang around for an easy meal !

Me and brad have seen numerous pictures of gannets and their colonies but we tried to get something "different" and unique so we tried a lot of different angles.

Later this upcoming week we will do a video review on the tripod head, the Jobu Jr Gimbal head ! and maybe our Kwik camo blinds !