I think, anyway.
Over at the neighborhood pond the other evening, right as the beavers would be making their appearance (and were,) my attention was distracted by a pair of subjects quite close by, and so I switched focus over to them.
This is a pair of juvenile green herons (Butorides virescens,) and judging from their appearance and behavior, they’d recently left the nest – like, that day, I’m guessing. This was surprising to me, because I thought the species would have nested and fledged out weeks ago, but perhaps this is a second nest after an unsuccessful first? I’d already seen evidence this year of young ones sticking around the tree that hosted a nest in years past, but this was in an entirely different location, and I haven’t (yet) spotted this nest even though, given their predilection to remain locked to this one longneedle pine tree, it’s in there somewhere. Regardless, the video does a better job of illustration, despite my horrible videography skills.
[If it seems like I’m terrible at finding/tracking, bear in mind that I’m still required to use the LCD on the back of the camera for video work, and this destroys my aiming instincts, made much worse by working at high magnification; I’m a little slicker with my eye to the viewfinder at least, and I might get better with more practice. While I have an external monitor that I could be using, this would likely make it even worse because it would be significantly misaligned from the camera and lens axis. Meanwhile the microphone, while on a separate arm and a vibration isolating mount, nonetheless picks up a little too much camera noise, especially from zooming and loosening the ballhead lock, and I’m not sure how much I can do about that, but I’m looking into it.]
We’ll close with one of the images that you hear being snapped during the video recording, a portrait that seems way out of proportion to all the framing adjustments I was making because of numerous intervening branches and the constant repositioning of the birds, not to mention the fading light. I’m good with it.
