outdoor photography

Northern Flicker This morning I dropped by Mead Gardens before work. I'd seen an "empid" flycatcher there over the last few days I hadn't been able to photograph.  Others had seen it too, and yesterday several people photographed it, recorded its call, and confirmed it to be a Yellow-bellied Flycatcher.  I didn't know that this morning.  All I wanted was to photograph it to help identify it.  Funny how things work, though.  I found the bird, and I took several photos, but all of them were blurry (my camera focused  on the leaves behind the bird).  So I didn't get the photograph, but I did get the ID.  And it's a lifer for me.  Hopefully it will stick around one more morning and let me photograph it tomorrow. Great Egret But this morning wasn't a photographic loss.  A Northern Flicker posed nicely for me, and A Great Egret caught a frog and played with it long enough for me to get a few photos.  Interestingly, this egret an...

Bobcat This morning I returned again to Merritt Island to see what we hadn't seen yesterday. We went to Pumphouse Loop Bio Lab Rd, Scrub Ridge Trail and the visitors center.  Pumphouse Loop was hardly worth mentioning but I did find a Green Heron that sat still very nicely for me and let me take its picture. Green Heron Dragonfly Bio Lab Rd was much more fun.  We decided that we should start from the south and work our way north.  Right off the bat we saw two Bobcats, and I was able to take my best photographs of this wonderful animal.  Then we were treated to a Great Blue Heron killing and swallowing what I believe is a Southern Water Snake.  We saw several species of shorebirds including Semipalmated Plover, Killdeer, many Black-necked Stilts, a Stilt Sandpiper, a Spotted Sandpiper, and a Ruddy Turnstone.  We also saw many Semipalmated Sandpipers and a couple Western Sandpipers.  On the north end of the roa...