Big Baby

This is an immature night heron I spotted last night out at Quick Point Nature Preserve at the south end of Longboat Key. That's a great spot for finding some wading birds, and it didn't disappoint. I've got more than just this guy I want to share with you, so stay tuned.

I think I've shown you an osprey standing pretty close to this very same spot before. Seems to be a popular perch.

Okefenokee Heron

Here's the only other bird I had the chance to shoot while visiting the Okefenokee in Georgia. This was the next day when I visited the Okefenokee Swamp Park with my mother. This immature night heron suddenly sprung up out of the bushes and flew away. I was quick enough on the trigger to get a couple of picture of him in mid-air that aren't too bad.

Yellow & Black

Do these two birds look the same to you? Not exactly. Well, they're both the same type of bird, a yellow crowned night heron, just one is younger than the other. I believe the one above is just growing into his adult plumage, and he'll eventually look like the one below.  When they are little, the feathers look totally different, and I can still see some of that coloration and patterning in the one above, but I can also see a lot of the adult appearance in him.  And with a little luck, even his crab dinner will get bigger like the adult below.

Cleared For Landing

Another bird in flight at the Venice Rookery, this is a black-crowned night heron, one of the species you don't see too much out there. But there was at least one pair nesting on the island, and every time one of them would fly off to get a new twig to add to the nest, 20 cameras with lenses as long as your arm would click away as fast as they could until the bird was out of sight. I count myself lucky to be able to get these shots.

These aren't the most common birds in any situation, so to get pictures of them in flight is pretty cool. Notice the long single thin feather, yellow against the black background of the head and neck, streaming out onto his back.  You'll see in some of these shots that it's actually loose, not a line on his back. I don't know what the purpose of that is, but it's pretty showy.

It takes a lot of trips to get enough twigs to build a proper nest. All of these shots are from the same flight, but I shot several back-and-forth trips. I may post more, I may not. These pretty much tell the whole story.

This was the last shot before the heron disappeared into the darkness where he was building a nest. You can really see that long, thin, yellow feather streaming out behind him in this shot. That's an anhinga cluttering up the background. Once you get onto the island where the rookery is, it's hard to get a picture of just one bird. They're packed together pretty tightly out there.

Crowned

I told you it was a good night for bird pictures, but I'm not sure if you believe me yet. These shots of a black-crowned night heron should help convince you a wee bit. These first two shots should give you a good idea about those two long white feathers that adorn the back of their heads. I think they should be named after that, not the dark head. Trailing neck-feather birds. How's that? Oh, all these pictures are of the same bird, except this one, obviously. This one is the same species though, just a juvenile. His adult feathers haven't come in yet, but he's almost full size.