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| This Brant was photographed with the Canon 800mm f/5.6L IS lens and the EOS-1D MIII. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +1 2/3 stops: 1/320 sec. at f/6.7. Fill flash at -2 stops with the Better Beamer. Brant feed almost exclusively on sea lettuce and eel grass. |
I had a wonderful visit with my Mom, Hazel Morris who is 86. She lives with my younger sister in Holbrook, NY. I made it to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge on a foggy Saturday morning and was surprised to find lots of Brant by the North Channel Bridge. On my visit to the refuge proper only a single Tree Swallow was a cooperative subject. After lunch, I drove to the Marine Park Golf Course and walked the course. I had first set foot on the course probably 50 years ago before it was even opened officially. It was built on top of a garbage dump and was not much of a course back then, long and pretty much wide open. I was surprised to see that the course had matured beautifully and that the greens were superb. I was even more amazed to see many large flocks of Brant on the golf course. In all they surely numbered more than 5,000. While the bays of Brooklyn, Queens and Western Long Island are the epicenter of the wintering population of this species, I had never seen so many Brant in a single day in all the years that I lived and birded in New York; the species is doing quite weill.
On Monday May 18, I drove my Mom to downtown Brooklyn to see the hospital where she was born, the first house she lived in, and other spots in the old neighorhood. She was amazed to see how much had changed. After lunch at Juniors Restaurant on Dekalb and Flatbush, we headed to the Marine Park section of Brooklyn, visited my elementary school (PS 207), Grandma Selma’s house, and the house where I had lived as a child. All in all it was a great day filled with many fond memories for both my Mom and I.
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| This Brant was threatening another. It was photographed with the Canon 800mm f/5.6L IS lens and the EOS-1D MIII. ISO 640. Evaluative metering +1 2/3 stops: 1/200 sec. at f/5.6 in Manual mode. Fill flash at -2 stops with the Better Beamer. |
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| This Tree Swallow was photographed with the Canon 800mm f/5.6L IS lens and the EOS-1D MIII. ISO 800. Evaluative metering +2/3 stop: 1/80 sec. at f/11. Fill flash at -2 stops with the Better Beamer. |
Though the end of the branch was broken and a thinner perch would have been ideal, I could not resist this cute and cooperative subject. He sat for more than 10 minutes for a portrait session.
