Kite Flying

I was on my way home from work this evening when a bird caught my eye. (Some days it's amazing I ever get where I'm going...) At first I didn't think it was anything special, then he banked and I saw that split tail. It's a scissor-tail kite, one of the birds you don't see too often. So I look for a place to pull over and there is nothing but curb all along the road. By the time I find a place where I can pull over, I'm too far away to see him. I turn around and go back, but now he's nowhere to be found. I make a u-turn back to my original direction and head for home. But then he crosses my path again. I turn around again, but can't find him. Third time around, I just park the car where I can and wait. Sure enough, he eventually flies by, making lazy circles several hundred feet above me. I was next to a small drainage pond, but it must be a place he likes because he'd fly off then come back around the pond. I shot him for twenty minutes until he finally headed off to the south (towards my condo, ironically enough) and didn't return. He never got really close (certainly not as close as the last time I shot one of these guys), but with my 400 mm lens I was able to get some decent shots. Oh, and he stayed between me and the sun, so the exposure is poor on all of these. I guess I'm just never happy. (But I got to shoot a kite!)

With that split tail, it's impossible to mistake these birds for anybody else in the air. Before I saw the tail, I saw the white head and though it might be an osprey. He's too small to be an eagle, although he wasn't too far from the local bald eagle nest.

I wish I could have caught him with lots of light on the underside. But here you can get an idea of the color pattern on the bottom.

This one may be cropped a bit too much, the sky is starting to devolve into different colored pixels. But it's still a nice picture.

Another Kite

I spotted another scissortail kite yesterday on the interstate. At 75 MPH, it's hard to get a picture, so you'll have to make do with this picture of the one I spotted a couple of weeks ago. They're pretty few and far between, so I think it's odd that I spotted another one so soon. But they're cool birds, and well worth keeping an eye out for.

Kite Flight

I had a very surprising encounter with a rare bird this afternoon. I was on my way to my parent's house when I saw a scissor-tailed kite fly by. That's an extremely rare occurrence, since I'd only seen one of these birds once before in the wild, and only twice before in captivity. Odder still, he flew by again. And again. And then once more. I was stuck behind a bus that seemed unable to turn at the stop sign ahead of us, so I took the hint, grabbed my camera, put on the big lens, and hopped out. Sure enough, this kite just kept right on circling. I got over a hundred shots, and these are some of the best.

Look at that beautiful forked tail! That's a dead giveaway that you're looking at a kite. Nothing else in the sky look like that, at least nothing this large.


A couple of times, a smaller bird tried to run the kite off, but to no avail. He just circled and circled, eventually heading off to points unknown. I wish I could see stuff like this every day.

Kites Are Fun

Planes, helicopters and birds weren't the only things flying at the Sun-N-Fun this weekend. Kitty Hawk Kites also had a huge display and they seemed to be doing a brisk business. They had a couple dozen kites flying over their tent, held aloft in the stiff breeze by long fiberglass poles. Not everyone can afford a fancy plane or an ultralight, but you can always get a kite and pretend that's you up there in the breeze.

Go Fly A Kite

What could possibly be cooler than shooting my first woodpecker? How about shooting my first Swallowtail Kite? Before today, I'd only seen these guys in rehab centers, where they always moped around in the back of the cage, mostly on the ground, never really looking like anything I'd want to photograph. And then today, while I was shooting something else, my dad points up and asks why I'm not shooting the kite. Because I'd not spotted it! And after I did spot it, I only got a couple frames off before it glided on out of sight. How about that forked tail?