The Estate Finds are written ahead of time and scheduled to post at 6 AM each Friday – sometimes not too far ahead of time, but they’re certainly not ‘real time’ posts. This past one almost could have been though, as twice during the day Friday I achieved updates on the primary subject.
At midday, I saw something fly into the pond as I was talking to The Girlfriend out back, thinking it was a wood duck until I saw it landing with neck outstretched far beyond what a wood duck could accomplish. The bird disappeared into foliage, but remained where it was while I snagged the camera and long lens, which was enough to bring it out adequately.
While I won’t insist this is the same green heron (Butorides virescens) as before, the chances are in favor of that at least, and this shows that it seems to like the pond. Also, that it’s not quite as spooky as many of the same species that I’ve dealt with before. I was being extremely careful not to alarm it, but it really wasn’t paying me much heed, even when it should have been well aware of my presence. I admit I could have done without that little dangling vine/branch right by the eye.
It’s got quite a hiding place there, being next to invisible among the leaves and branches – if I hadn’t seen it land, it’s unlikely that I would have spotted it otherwise without some rash move on its part. Meanwhile, it took a few moments to preen.
At least now it shifted enough to clear the eye. These frames are all cropped a bit, so the view I had through the viewfinder was much reduced from this and I couldn’t make out those fine branches enough to know when the eye was visible.
This is why I hate autofocus, far more often than I think should be warranted. It’s supposed to work on contrast detection within the active AF area, which should clearly have snagged the head and body of the heron, even in silhouette, but for reasons unknown it instead jumped to the background pond plants. At right is approximately what I could see in the viewfinder, with the center AF area indicating that it had locked focus, and it was impossible to tell that it wasn’t actually on the heron itself. This also makes it a little tricky to rely on manual focus as well, since the view is too small to ensure critical sharpness, especially with the very faint ‘pixelation’ of a ground glass focusing screen – I struggle with this all the time with things like moon photos, and I deal with it by taking multiple frames with repeated focus tweaks to try and ensure that at least one of them is bang-on. This is a hell of a lot harder to do with a moving subject of course. Stopping down the aperture to achieve a higher depth-of-field doesn’t work very well at these magnifications, at least not with the Tamron 150-600 – the DOF just doesn’t extend very far regardless.
In late afternoon as the sun was dropping behind the trees, the heron reappeared, squawking suddenly as it left its semi-hidden spot on the pond to come right out in the open, albeit open shade.
I was out in the middle of the backyard pursuing another subject which will probably be featured shortly, so I doubt I could have been much more obvious, though still removed from the heron by 15-20 meters – it just didn’t seem to care. That perch is the exact same one used by the turtles in the previous post, and how the heron was even seeing any quarry under that blanket of duckweed, I’ll never know.
We now get to see that they have much longer necks than it appears. Normally, I think, the herons avoid putting their feet in the water when they can, simply because it might scare the minnows that they’re after, but this one seemed to be;ieve that getting deeper may work better. The stretched neck puts me in mind of people wading into cold water, thinking that standing on tiptoe helps somehow.
Another bit of evidence that it wasn’t concerned about me, because it shifted position closer to me and the shore. I was looking away and believe I missed its attempt at catching a minnow, since I’ve seen this kind of fluff-and-shuffle after just such an action; that’ll teach me (and yet, I was simultaneously following another subject, so that’s the chance you take, you know?) But sure – if the heron wants to keep popping up this frequently, I’ll be happy to keep shooting. I’d even do something to encourage it to stay and keep hunting here, if I could determine what.
All of these did nothing whatsoever to alleviate the backlog of photos that I have, but at least May should be a significant month for photo uploads. I’m looking forward to the awards I’ll receive for that…