After a gout of photos taken in the past few days, there comes the sorting. It’s not enough to simply take them, to capture them, no no – they must be examined for merit, culled of any that do not pass muster (very, very few, naturally,) and then distributed into folders appropriate for their primary subject. Not to mention copying them all onto separate harddrives in a process that I like to call, “backing up.” And while doing this recently, I came across a couple of curious details that I’d like to share with you (you get half, and I get half, exactly, at the same time, ready? One, two, three…)
The first is something almost invisible in the original exposure, but brightened here to make it easier to see, of an osprey (Pandion haliaetus) over Jordan lake from a few days back.
They eyes are what we’re paying attention to here, and I won’t say for sure that it’s looking back and down at me, but those eyes sure are aligned in that direction, aren’t they? The lower part of bird skulls tends to be narrower than the upper portion, allowing many species to have a gaze that can fall directly down from normal orientation, ‘seeing under their chin,’ as it were.
And then we have our most recent subject, zoomed in and color-tweaked here.
The eyes are the key focus here too (a ha ha, get it?) just for the sake of it. I have no idea how well herons can see something held in the base of their beak, but it’s probably not too often that they’ll ever come more eye-to-eye with their prey, almost like pro wrestlers before a match, only a lot less stupid.
I just thought you should see these. I would say that we’ll now return to normal content, but you and I both know that’s not gonna happen here.