outdoor photography

Red Knot Daytona Beach Shores is a great place to go to see gulls in the winter time in Florida.  About an hour before sundown, they fly in and land along the coastline by the tens of thousands.  My father and I went to see Thayer and Iceland Gulls that have been seen there frequently.  We picked the wrong day, though. I'm not sure if it was the wind or something else, but we were stuck with scanning about 2000 gulls, and none of them were the ones we wanted to find. The consolation prize was a Red Knot along the shore.  I think they're wonderful birds, even in their winter plumage, so I had fun taking a few photographs of it. Red Knot By the way, I changed my site design.  My new computer has a full HD screen, and now every time I look at my blog I think my photos are way too small.  Unfortunately, blogger doesn't seem to let you automatically size your blog width relative to the size of your screen, so I have to try to find a happy middle ground...

Glaucous Gull A few days ago I drove up to Daytona Beach in the afternoon to look for gulls.  An Iceland Gull and a Glaucous Gull had been seen the day before, and we were hoping to find them.  The Iceland Gull eluded us, but the Glaucous Gull was very easy to find near a headless Herring Gull.  This bird has come much farther south than it should have, but I'm not complaining. Glaucous Gull Well, there were other birds there too, though not as many as there were a few weeks ago, when it was estimated that 60,000 gulls were lining the shoreline every evening.  I suspect that when we were there, there were well less than 5,000 gulls along the 1.5 mile stretch of beach that we walked. Lesser Black-backed Gull Ring-billed Gull And there were even a few shorebirds around, mostly Willets, Black-bellied Plovers, Ruddy Turnstones, and Sanderlings. Willet