Ya know…sometimes when you’re doing that whole triple D thing like the title says ya can just possibly overthink things a bit…and while I don’t think we’re at that point yet Neil does have one of ‘em to figger out…and at this point he’s seriously considering altering his photographic planning, a t least for birds here in FL.

Ya see…he got out last Saturday for his first outing of the season…it’s a little early for breeding and nesting activities but some of the critters have (as you will see) already gotten a head start. One of the folks he’s going to Africa in April with was on her annual visit down here to the Sunshine State to visit friends and see birds…so they got together for a morning of shooting up at Venice Rookery 50ish miles north of our home.

So he was taking both his Z8 and Z9 Nikon bodies and the latter has a recent update adding bird eye autofocus that he needed to try out…and long story short…wow, it’s a serious improvement over the older version of the firmware. And since it was birds he was taking his 600mm PF lens and decided to take the 100-400mm zoom lens as the second lens instead of the fixed 400mm prime lens…his thoughts were that while everybody knows that zooms are generally lower image quality than a prime lens they offer flexibility if you need a wider angle/shorter focal length over the prime…and for most practical purposes when you’re outputting images to be primarily viewed on screen the quality is pretty comparable…but the prime is generally a faster lens than the zoom is and the autofocus is therefore a bit faster (which is important for fast moving critters). Size and weight wise the two are pretty similar but he decided that the flexibility was more important. The goal for the day besides meeting one of his travel to Africa partners was to concentrate on bird eye autofocus and practice with moving birds in flight or BIF. 

He came home from the 3 hour shoot with about 1500 frames (hey, he did use 12 frames per second instead of the 20 the bodies will do so at least there was that limitation)…and imported all of them into Lightroom for processing. Tossing out the obviously bad shots…focus didn’t lock, clipped the wing or tail of the bird, and the inevitable oopsies…that got rid of about 400 which is a pretty good ration of decent shots. Then he did a first pass and got it down to 300ish to review for the blog and then reduced that to the 20something you’ll eventually see in this post. But as he was going through the processing…he wondered whether the flexibility of the zoom actually did him any good…so he fired up the Lightroom filters and filtered by focal length…and it turned out that about 90% of the decent shots were shot either with the 600mm prime, the 600mm prime withy the 1.4 converter for a focal length of 840, or the 100-400 with the focal length in the 360-400mm range…so in this case no, the flexibility provided him no advantage. He’s going to try again the next time he goes out in a couple weeks using the 400 and 600 but will put the 100-400 in his backpack just in case and if the trend continues he might just take the primes rather than the zoom for birding trips. On the other hand…the zoom is going to be the second lens in Africa along with the 600 because the sometimes short distances to the animals there would put the 400 out of the running for the shot…and sometimes you want to get environmental shots in addition to portrait shots.

Anyways…he culled the decent shots down to the 26 you see here and processed them for me so buckle up kiddos…

One thing though…Ima not going to identify the same species of bird 27 times for ya…so I’ll just do it once and then try and remember when you see the next same species. A few notes…the Great Blue Heron is also known as a GBH and their genders are the same in appearance…as are the Ospreys, Cormorants, and pretty much everything seen here with the exception of the Anhinga and Red Winged Blackbird which are sexually dimorphic. And these are shown in approximately the correct time sequence starting about10 minutes before dawn and running until 1030 or so. As he expected…the nesting waders had not really arrived in number but on the other hand he saw a total of at least 5 or 6 Ospreys fishing for breakfast, some not so successfully at first but most of them eventually caught something. They sort of hover over the water and then dive completely in talons first to grab the fish and then take off from the water.

Osprey with breakfast…this was the first one of the day and since it was still pretty dark he could only use 1/100 of a second shutter speed which resulted in lots of motion blur in the wings. But the new Z9 firmware caught the eye pretty well and he likes both the wing blur as well as the water drops heading back towards the lake.

Male Red Winged Blackbird

Double Crested Cormorant

Male Mottled Ducks

GBH flexing wings

Failed Osprey breakfast attempt

Hovering before the plunge

Another failure

And yet another failure

Female Anhinga…the male has black neck and breast…and both have much brighter green eyes at breeding season

Success

The last seconds before the plunge…but trying to follow it down to the water is pretty much an exercise in futility

Great Egret squawking IFF as it comes in for a landing

GBH bringing in some nesting material

Great Egret in breeding plumage (the stringy long feathers on the back half of the body)

Another GBH coming in for a landing

And being warned off by the nearby Great Egret in the lower right

Great Egret with nesting material

GBH chick…one of the ugliest babies you’ll see

And zooming in a little closer his little brother or sister. It hatched much later obviously based on size and will likely be killed by the larger chick so it can hog all the food that mom and dad bring

Black Crowned Night Heron…guess how it got the name?

The Great Egret on another nesting material delivery

Cormorant again

On the home front…nothing much to really report. Connie got her injured shoulder (she tripped over Neil’s foot in the dark) X-rayed and it isn’t broken so the doc is insisting on treating her for ‘slight indications of arthritis in the joint’ despite the fact that she told her it didn’t hurt until she tripped and landed on her elbows jamming the shoulder and producing a pretty spectacular bruise on her hip. I guess eventually the’ll do an MRI or CT to figure out the real problem after more pain medication doesn’t help (like it hasn’t helped ever since Thanksgiving). 

She found a Saint Saëns Organ Symphony concert up in Jax in a few weeks so they’re going to make a trip up there for it and to visit a couple of birding spots on a quick 3 day trip. And they’re schlepping up to Orlando before that to get their TSA interview for the trusted traveler program which lets you not take your shoes off or your laptop out of the bag and usually makes your stay in the TSA line at the airport shorter.

Our Elks Lodge needs to move again…since the building is being demolished. One group of members who have a 25 year old Scotch taste and a Natty Lite budget is still looking for a place to lease but they’re burying their heads in the same we think as nothing we can afford they will find acceptable and the ones they deem viable are too expensive. So another group of members is talking to a different lodge about merging and we think that’s the only outcome that makes financial sense for either us or the other lodge…and in addition it’s actually closer to home than where we are located now…and they have a kitchen with fried chicken dinners on Monday and fish dinners on Friday. The chicken is broasted which is a fryer/pressure cooker combo and they use just seasoned flour instead of a better so you get fried chicken with a lot less coating and grease than from the Colonel…it’s the 2nd or 3rd best fried chicken we’ve ever had. But we’re deliberately staying out of the political drama…we consider ourselves social members at this point so we do events and dinners and the like but skip the meetings except for election ones although to be honest there’s usually one person running for each office anyway so it’s really not much of an election.

I guess you saw where Nick Saban retired from coaching Alabama after the playoffs and they hired the fellow from Washington to be the new coach…he seems pretty good record wise but we’ll see how things go in the fall with new coaches and schemes.

Interesting things found on the net.

If you go
here…you can read about how the UK is trying to modify their Investigative Procedures Act to basically mandate encryption of out existence…and according to the interpretation the home office has given the legislation the law will apply to all countries worldwide no matter whether they have UK customers or not. Yeah…I’m sure all of the tech companies are going to agree with that.

You’ve probably read in the news or seen on TV the terrible problem of ‘microplastics’ and how they get into everything from bottled water to seafood to just about everything else…and how bad the things are for you. Well…that might be true and then again it might not be true…but from the news reports you probably think that this is mostly a US caused problem. But…you would be wrong. As reported here 88% to 95% of the microplastics are discharged into the oceans from the 10 rivers highlighted in red…and you’ll notice that none of them are in the US. Africa, China, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East are the main offenders…so the Blame America First crowd needs to shut up. I don’t know the actual source of the image…but it was tweeted by Massimo who is a pretty credible guy at finding the actual facts and verifying what he posts.

And the dumbest one of the week comes to us from the city of Atlanta as noted
here. A small construction business owner in Atlanta bought an empty lot and as required before he can start construction he got the water company to come and put in a meter. And then he got a bill for almost $9,000 for using over 305,000 gallons of water in a month…while the average household only uses about 400. When the house was finally connected to the water line almost 2 years later the bill was about $13 a month. The company owner appealed the bill and was rejected by the Atlanta water company. He appealed that…and was again rejected despite the bills continuing and are now up to almost $30,000…and even though one board member agreed with him but was (in her words) ‘forced’ to vote against fixing the bill due to administrative processes. The company owner checked with the golf course across the street to see if they had any flooding problems and the answer was No…but they would have had issues with a leak of that magnitude. So…either the water leaked due to faulty installation of the meter, or the meter is faulty, or somebody stole the water but that seems a pretty unlikely cause as a truck would only hold about 10,000 gallons maximum if you stole the water and the amount would have been 30 trucks a month for several months. The water company admitted in the middle of this that the problem was actually caused by leakage due to water company employees…and at that point the owner figured the problem was solved…but that statement was denied by somebody higher up in the legal department at the water authority. Nuts.

Here’s one we found especially amusing…it comes from fark.com which references actual media articles and applies funny stories to them. As you may (or then again, may not) know…back in 1965 there was a truck crash in Scranton PA due to a load of bananas…30,000 pounds of them…on a truck that lost it’s brakes as it came down off of the mountains into the valley where Scranton is. The 33 year old driver intentionally eventually crashed the truck so it would not hit the gas station at the edge of town He swerved around pedestrians and eventually lost his life to save others. This crash would never have been really noticed outside of Scranton except for the accidental presence of one Harry Chapin who at that time was a young, struggling musician…who happened to be in the bus station catching a bus to someplace and read about the accident in the local newspaper…so he decided to write a song about it…you can read the
wikipedia article and learn all about the song, it’s alternate endings and such…the full version of the song is 20 per 25 minutes long so it was mostly played at concerts and not on the radio. Anyways…the name of the song is Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas and Neil and Connie had heard it in college…so naturally when we passed through Scranton in the RVing days we went to the spot, took pictures, and posted about it in the blog. 

And that’s all just to explain the lead in to the interesting thing found on the net. On fark.com there was a post linking to
this article…which details an accident up in CT where 40,000 pounds of bananas were spilled all over I-95. Fark.com links typically have an amusing headline rewrite…and the one used for this article was “It’s time to update the lyrics I guess.”

And the second dumbest one of the week…it’s apparently
illegal and you can go to jail out in Las Vegas on the strip if you commit the terrible crime of of stopping on a pedestrian bridge over the street to take a photograph.

And

And finally…a li’l bit more of math nerdery. But…ya are gonna have to pull out your calculator because not even Neil was smart enough to do this in his head.

On your calculator…enter the first three digits of your phone number…not the area code though, the 4th through 6th digits of just the phone number part.

Multiply by 80.

Add 1.

Multiply by 250.

Add the last 4 digit of your phone number.

Add the last 4 digits of your phone number again.

Subtract 250.

Divide by 2.

Recognize the answer?

Cyas.