A February Visit to Florida: Day 4

As February turned to March, it was time to leave Vero Beach and return to Boston. The route to Orlando Airport went very close to Orlando Wetlands Park where I had been the day before. Since my flight did not leave until mid-afternoon, I decided to check out relatively early and return to the park to spend the morning observing the birds and taking photos. As you will see in this final post from my Florida trip, I had a good morning.

Just after I arrived, I heard a Barred Owl calling. Working my way into a wooded patch, I found the owl up in a tree but without a clear shot. I struggled for perhaps 15 minutes to get an angle that worked. Finally, as I kept changing my vantage point and the owl occasionally moved around, I was able to capture the image above.

Leaving the owl, I headed out onto one of the boardwalks. I found a spot I liked and just stayed still for a while, photographing the birds that came and went. The Tricolored Heron above approached a nearby cluster of grasses, then hopped onto the railing of the boardwalk quite close to me. This morning I was shooting with my 200-600mm zoom lens. Most of the time, I was zoomed in to 600mm to make the birds as large as possible in the image. In this case, given how close the heron was, I had to zoom almost all the way back out to 200mm just to capture this head shot.

Moving down the boardwalk, I spotted this Great Egret.

Further down the boardwalk, a Black Vulture was drying its wings in a tree.

I spent the next couple of hours wandering throughout the park. The cloud cover was often heavy, but sometimes the sun would peak through. In this case, there was enough of a gap in the clouds to help light up this White Ibis on a branch.

By the edge of the water, there were a number of these dead trees. This Osprey sat, lit up by the sun behind me, stands out nicely from the darker clouds in the background. Frequently, our eyes are drawn to the bird’s eye or eyes in a photo. While this happens initially for me in this photo, my eyes then slide down the white of the Osprey’s breast and settle on the Osprey’s sharp talons. Mark Smith, the professional bird photographer with whom I had worked with the previous three days, has a wonderful book Osprey: The Glorious Pursuit of Unbridled Determination. His cover photo is of an Osprey diving, with the focal point directly on the Osprey’s deadly outstretched talons.

Less than 10 minutes later, the cloud bank in front of me had been pushed aside by the clearer weather behind me, giving a very different feel to the day and to this photo of a Red-shoulder Hawk. As it happens, we have a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks nesting right near our house at the moment; yet thus far, my best Red-Shouldered Hawk photo of the year is this one from Florida.

As I made my way back towards the park entrance, I photographed this Limpkin. This is a species that I first saw on day 2 and again on day 3, but this is the nicest photo I was able to capture.

On my last post, I had a photograph of the Purple Gallinule. Here is a photograph of the Common Gallinule. In Florida the Common Gallinule is in fact much more common than the Purple Gallinule. I had first seen a Common Gallinule on Day 2 and seen many more on day 3; however, I like this photograph the best.

I spotted this Green Heron in the far distance scampering along. Not so long in the past, I would have had to use this photo as a “small in frame” image with lots of the surrounding environment in the picture. As it turns out, the added scenery of the broader photo is simply not that interesting. However, with the sharpness of today’s lenses, the quality and number of megapixels in today’s camera, and AI software that sharpens and gets rid of noise in an image, I could heavily crop the photo to isolate the bird, and still have a fine image.

Finally, I will end my Florida trip with a humorous shot of a male and female Mottled Duck looking for food. I hope that everyone has enjoyed these posts. On my website, I have a gallery of 90 photos from my 2024 Central Florida trip organized by species. While I have included many of those photos in these past 4 blog posts, I simply could not include them all. Check them out if you are interested.