The foot bridge is a crossing over a moat, into a kingdom of feathers at Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve. In this regenerated, re-planted Bolsa Bay, bird calls and murmurs bubble up from the terns, Sanderlings, scoters, avocets, grebes, plovers, pelicans, sparrows, Willets and egrets who call this haven home. The marsh is barely shielded from…
Things I’d Never Seen ….
As little as I’ve been out in the field with my camera lately (relative to how it used to be), I’ve had a disproportionate number of firsts in terms of wildlife viewings. Some of it is my change of environment and the newness of Seattle and its wild offspring. And some of it is, well…
The Turns of Terns
I’ve described terns, with their distinct calls, as aerial barflies with too much whiskey and smoke on the voice box. Each tern is raspy in its own way, and Caspian Terns have a sharp croak that pierces the air over my balcony. They’re huddled on a warehouse rooftop one minute, hundreds of them, blurred by…
Forster’s in Flight
When you first encounter terns, their mid-air, hairpin turns seem unpredictable and difficult to capture — especially since these birds are quite small when you’re thinking about filling the frame.
More Alameda Terns: Caspian, Forster’s, Least Terns
Take a look at this image of terns — not because it’s anything spectacular. In fact, those terns were but specks on my visual horizon, so this is a dramatic crop to show just one thing: the size differential between the Caspian Terns and the Forster’s Terns I wrote about in a previous post. The…
There is a Season … Terns (Alameda Terns)
Lame Byrds pun aside . . . Tern Nation in Alameda Their gravelly call precedes them, these terns with their fuzzy black berets and orange feet. They sound like aerial barflys with too much whiskey and smoke on the voice box. When it’s a row of more than 50 terns — alternately calling to each other…
