I was taking a walk along the River Itchen in Winchester and there were some swans swimming up the river towards me. One was swimming along quite normally but a second was following it and was swimming in a strange way. It had its head low to the water and was swimming in a surging motion rather than the regular paddling. I don’t know whether this was some sort of mating action or just a weird swan! Video seemed to be the best way to record this.
During my first stroll around Winnall Moors, I caught a glimpse of a bird of prey as it swooped across the grass. I tried to get the camera on it as it moved by. It headed to the grass and then took off again, apparently carrying something with it. Not sure what sort of rodent it had found but it had found a meal. I hadn’t set the camera up for fast moving targets so got whatever I could as it flew away. The light was a little low but the high ISO shots these days are really nothing to worry about. I am hoping to get plenty more opportunities like this. Now to find some kingfishers!
I don’t know whether robins are in our area year-round but there is a feeling that they show up in spring so would have migrated somewhere else for the winter. Maybe that is true, maybe it applies to other locations. I don’t know. All I do know is that I was surprised to see one in December in Kenmore. So much so, I decided to get some images of it. How many times of the year would I completely ignore a robin?
No great story for this one. I was just watching a turtle as it same in Lake Washington and, as it came towards me, I thought it looked good so grabbed some shots. No action, no feeding, just a turtle swimming lazily along.
While mum was visiting us for Christmas, we made a trip to Skagit to see if we could see some snow geese. We did but that element of the story will be another post. We also wanted to see whether we could see any of the short-eared owls up there. The weather was not great with plenty of rain sweeping across the flats, but the owls don’t get to stay at home when the weather is bad, so we tried our luck. We got there and no one was around which is not common for Skagit. Despite this, we parked up alongside the marshes to see if anything moved.
A few minutes of nothing much and then a northern harrier appeared so things weren’t a total loss. However, we didn’t need to wait long and soon the owls were on the prowl. As is normally the case, they were keeping themselves a little away from where we were, but we had a good view of them. Then, one of them flew in close by and landed on a post in the ground directly across from the car. It really couldn’t have done a better job. I was able to get some shots of it sitting there in the rain with its wings slightly out – presumably because of the wet.
It sat there for a while and then it fluffed up the feathers to shake off the water before taking flight. This couldn’t have been better set up for mum to get her owl experience. We continued to have them flying around near us as they hunted but we never got so close again. Indeed, one of them repeated the post trick further down the road but I didn’t feel the need to dash down there. Besides, the rain was coming and going and, by jumping out to take pictures, I had got a little damp. At least I had a warm car to retreat to, unlike the damp owls!
The main purpose for our trip to Skagit with mum was to try and find the snow geese. Our previous visit had been thwarted so we were skeptical as to whether we would have any luck this time. Instead of fields of geese, we saw a very large number of swans. They were all over some of the fields, so they were our new target. However, the geese hadn’t totally failed us. In amongst the swans, a small group of geese swooped down to land in the same field. I have no idea why they were alone and not with thousands of their brethren.
The swans did make for a good level of compensation. There were a few that occasionally took off or landed but never in a particularly convenient spot for me photos. However, watching them as they munched through the contents of the fields was a good alternative. It has got me excited about trying to get some more swan shots back in the UK – this time with the mute swans.
If there is one consistent thing with birds it is that, if they have caught something to eat, another bird will do its best to try and pinch it. It doesn’t seem to matter whether they second bird is bigger or smaller. They will try their luck. I have definitely seen the big birds taking on the smaller ones but more often it seems to be the smaller ones trying to annoy the big ones. It is a strange choice because I’ve never seen it be effective. An immature bald eagle had caught something up in Skagit and it was standing contemplating its meal. A short-eared owl decided it wanted the food instead so swooped repeatedly at the eagle. To be fair, the eagle couldn’t have looked less concerned if it tried. It watched the owls come in many times but never flinched. Eventually it took off and carried its snack somewhere else to eat in peace.
While mum was visiting, we took a stroll down to Log Boom Park in Kenmore. You never know what wildlife might turn up and we did get one bald eagle directly overhead. What pleased me more (as will come as no surprise to regular readers) was the large gathering of cormorants. They were on the posts, in the water and flying overhead. Plenty of them to see in lovely light (although a bunch were backlit.
The high point was one cormorant that was fishing alongside the jetty and came up with a sizable fish in its mouth. It was going to have to work hard to maneuver this fish into position to swallow it. I figured that video might be a better way of recording the efforts the bird had to make. It did take quite some time to get it in the right place but finally the fish went down in one piece. I am amazed at the things that birds can swallow when they catch them.
Puget Sound gets runs of different species of salmon throughout the year. I had heard of some of them but only recently became aware of chum salmon. Not particularly good to eat, by all accounts, these run in the October to November time-frame. Carkeek Park in Seattle has a river that they come to in order to spawn. We paid it a visit. The salmon stop eating once they leave the sea, so they are using up their remaining energy to go upriver before the mate and die.
The river was quite shallow, so they had to work hard to get up against the current and up some of the steps the riverbed took. The river was scattered with the bodies of dead salmon. I don’t know whether they had already mated and then died or whether they didn’t have the energy to make it upriver. Some of the fish still swimming had taken on the yellow look of the dead fish, and I wondered whether they weren’t going to make it much further.
While there were loads of fish, getting good images was a challenge I didn’t seem to do well with. Even with a polarizer, the reflections on the surface and the low light levels made things tricky. A fish underwater is not a great subject anyway. Watching what was happening, I felt that video was going to be the better bet, so I filmed the fish as much as I took stills. Below is a video of some of the highlights from our visits.
Recent visits to the locks at Ballard have included sightings of some large male sea lions. The seals are a regular feature, but these big boys have not previously been so common. We were watching one of them swim a little further away from us and getting a lot of attention from a flock of gulls. The reason the sea lions are showing up is that salmon must be on the move. The concentration of the fish at the locks makes it a good hunting spot for them.
I had the camera trained on the area that the gulls were swarming around, and the sea lion came up out of the water. The flash of pink in his mouth gave away that he had a salmon which he had caught. I couldn’t see what was happening in real time but going through the images afterwards, I could make out the sequence of events. The sea lion had caught the salmon and then seemed to have bitten off the head. There were bits of fish in the water and that was attracting the gulls. Then the sea lion picked up the body of the fish and flipped it around until it went down his throat in one chunk. No head but everything else with the tail the last to disappear. Maybe the gulls got a few morsels, but the sea lion took the (sea) lion’s share.