Bullheads for Breakfast

Sorry (once again) for the long break between posts. Maybe this three-fer will make up for it.

I haven't managed to shoot much lately, and it's been mostly crap. I thought I might do a little archive raiding, see what I could find that didn't make the light of day the first time around but that just didn't pan out.

This morning I got up early again in an attempt to make it out to Tsawwassen when the tide was out. Ideally I'd prefer to be there when the tide is on the way out (that would have been around midnight last night) and it's a nice sunny morning, but that just wasn't going to work out. Instead, I got there maybe a couple of hours after low tide (I was there by 7:30, low was at 4:44); no point being there any earlier as there just wouldn't have been enough light - it wasn't a sunny morning. Not raining either mind you, but quite overcast. The sun would eventually show itself, but not until the moment I started to drive away from the beach... which didn't really matter by then since the tide was well-in by then.

I managed to scare off the first batch of birds that I saw in the distance but eventually managed to stalk this heron for quite a while. He (she?) managed to get quite a good breakfast, as I saw it pull bullhead after bullhead out of the water. Apparently herons don't like seaweed - it would always dip, toss and shake its catch to get rid of the seaweed before flipping it in the air one last time...

Overall I was a little disappointed with the shots - I'd wanted to get some shots of a heron feeding and I did, but with the overcast sky they're far duller that I'd have preferred. And I had to shoot at pretty high ISO due to the low light so the images were pretty grainy. Good thing that herons are big birds, at least I didn't have to crop the images too much so the grain isn't too bad at this resolution.

One warning... I do still intend to try for better shots, so there will be more herons in the future (tides and weather cooperating). Also, I have a 12-workdays-in-a-row stint starting on Monday, so there might not be anything else posted for a while.

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