{"id":38614,"date":"2025-04-11T06:07:11","date_gmt":"2025-04-11T10:07:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=38614"},"modified":"2025-04-11T04:07:23","modified_gmt":"2025-04-11T08:07:23","slug":"estate-find-xv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2025\/04\/estate-find-xv\/","title":{"rendered":"Estate Find XV"},"content":{"rendered":"

All week I wasn’t finding a whole lot of new things to photograph, and Thursday was busy all day, so I ended up trying to find something late Thursday night\/early Friday morning. I was out with the night rig, and indeed got a glimpse of beavers, twice, but never could get focus before they slipped out of sight, and my attempt to out-patience them failed;<\/strong> I saw some ripples and heard a plop<\/em>, and I’m vaguely suspicious there’s another lodge that I hadn’t known about, but that was it.<\/p>\n

Returning, I was still looking around by the headlamp when I thought that the shapes on Turtle Island didn’t look quite right, and got the lens and focusing light on it. <\/p>\n

\"female
Yep, that’s a female wood duck, which I was pleased to find because there’s been no evidence that they were remaining on the pond overnight – every time I watched in the evening, everyone seemed to head out for the lower part of the pond, dubbed The Bayou. Naturally I zoomed in as much as possible, and Turtle Island really isn’t far from the bank, so I could close in pretty well for a single frame before she slipped into the water. Framing<\/em>, that’s another matter.<\/p>\n

\"female
It was this shot that made me go out to try again later on, after she’d returned to this roost, because I was annoyed with myself that the one sharp, closeup image was framed so badly. She wasn’t copacetic with the attention and soon slipped almost silently into the water, before I could nail focus, but I had a couple of frames that made me pause, and the drooping wing up there was suddenly explained. It took two more tries to finally get what I was after, and by this time it was beginning to rain seriously.<\/p>\n

\"female
Ducklings! This was definitely a surprise, because first of all, I had seen no evidence of nesting at all, and second, I would have confidently told you this was too early for ducklings – so much for my judgment. This wasn’t too far from the nest box, either;<\/strong> had she used it, or something else? I have no idea. No male was in evidence in the slightest, by the way, any of the four times I was trying for shots.<\/p>\n

By the way, if you go back to the second pic and look right in front of her breast, you’ll see the first confirmation – I hadn’t actually found it until subsequent tries when the rippling I was seeing in the focusing light (which was much less effective than the flash, many times dimmer) made me suspect the ducklings.<\/p>\n

But almost immediately after the above frame, the brood shifted and gave me an excellent family portrait:<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"female
Well, if you’re all going to be that<\/em> cooperative, I’m amenable. By this point it was raining seriously, and between the risk to the camera equipment and the risk to the ducklings from getting too wet, I abandoned further efforts – the risk to the ducklings wasn’t that high, since it remains 16°c out there and they were exposed to the rain for about 10 seconds before I let them be. Considering that only a couple hours ago I was thinking I’d have to punt the Estate Find, though, this works pretty damn well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All week I wasn’t finding a whole lot of new things to photograph, and Thursday was busy all day, so I ended up trying to find something late Thursday night\/early Friday morning. I was out with the night rig, and indeed got a glimpse of beavers, twice, but never could get focus before they slipped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[4948,6785,993,8006,4947],"class_list":["post-38614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-photo","tag-aix-sponsa","tag-ducklings","tag-night-photography","tag-turtle-island","tag-wood-duck"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38614\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}