Bolsa Chica

A couple of weeks into the month, we figured that we have barely left the house and we made the effort to go out and do something. With the weather being so bad lately and not finding much to photograph lately at San Jacinto Wildlife area, we decided to see what it was like in Bolsa Chica. At least it should be a little cooler being next to the ocean. Unfortunately, we didn't check and it was high tide so there was not a ton of birds in their usual places.

We did still manage to get a small handful of new birds. We got a Least Tern and a Black Tern.

I also got a shot of an Osprey with it's catch which was amazing! I had been tracking him for some time but there was false alarm at one point when it dove in the ocean but came back up with nothing unless it was small and it just ate it. It was quite a distance away and the bridge was in the way where it had dove down. Christian had left his camera capturing a time lapse of the clouds or something and had gone back to the car for something. At some point, I was messing with my camera, trying to see if I captured anything when I hear Christian yelling at me from the bridge. The Osprey was flying in m direction with a big fish in it's claws. A seagull made a slight attempt at stealing the catch from him. I frantically pointed my camera up to try to capture him. My lens is not the fastest and I have been having a lot of trouble getting it to focus fast enough to capture flying birds. It's been hit or miss, mostly miss...especially on the smaller faster birds. I have had limited success with the bigger ones that don't dart around quite so fast. Plus it is hard to even find the bird with my long lens before it disappears behind a tree or building...that's what is usually nice about Bolsa Chica, you have fairly wide open spaces to capture things.

I was pretty excited about this shot. We caught the Osprey with it's catch before but it was farther and I was down at a lower spot when it flew over me and a raised berm to plunge down on the other side to grab a fish and take off in the distance. I got a few shots off but they were not fabulous. You can tell what it was but that's about it. I still could have gotten a better shot if I was faster but I'm pretty happy with this one.

We also got a Yellow-crowned Night Heron which was pretty neat but it is a youngster and didn't have the adult plumage yet. I even got a video clip of him eating a sand crab! It didn't do much for much of the rest of the time. Just taking naps or grooming itself. We might have gotten a Baird's Sandpiper but it was amongst some other birds and a very great distance and with the heat haze, it was difficult to tell for sure. A lot of the shore birds look alike and are difficult to identify. It is nice that we have pictures so that we can investigate and identify them at our leisure at home...when we have a good enough shot of it at least.

We called it a day when there was no longer enough light out to get pictures and headed home.