Ancient Flight
In flight, great blue herons and great egrets have always reminded more of pterodactyls than birds.
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Ancient Flight
In flight, great blue herons and great egrets have always reminded more of pterodactyls than birds.
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Hunting in Green
I've been working variations of this theme for the past few years, the hunter hidden in the tall grasses. Most of them have been environmental portraits, but I think this one works better zoomed in.
While it might appear from the grass that the egret is hunting in a meadow, it's actually standing in a saltwater marsh, working a narrow channel while the tide is out. |
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Fish Toss
A great egret opens wide and tosses back a small fish, while a snowy egret continues to hunt in the background.
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Dead Center
A great egret spots movement and freezes to see if the creature will expose itself and start moving again. On this particular occasion, the intended prey escaped. Since there were plenty of other critters to hunt, the egret didn't have to spend a lot of time waiting out its dinner, so it paused only for a moment before looking elsewhere.
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Shrimp Breakfast
This snowy egret has just snagged a large shrimp from the freshwater marsh beside the causeway. I was visiting family for a week and got up each morning to be at the park when it opened at 6am, spent a few hours hiking and wildlife watching, and then headed back home for time with the family.
The first morning I was there, the water had a lot of stuff floating in it, and a small army of snowy and great egrets was gorging on shrimp — they feasted constantly the entire morning. The water was clearer the rest of the week and the egrets caught much less shrimp, so I was fortunate enough to have caught the feast that first morning. |
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A snowy egret stands among the algae mats in the freshwater marsh at Huntington Beach. This part of the marsh was visited by a variety of predators who fed on the creatures hiding in the algae. |
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Cold Shoulder
A snowy egret hunts for shrimp at sunrise in the freshwater marsh at Huntington Beach. I don’t often take pictures where you can’t see the bird’s face, but I like the way it works in the second picture. The egrets ignored both me and the alligators while they gorged themselves on shrimp that morning.
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