Well, I spent another full afternoon behind the camera along the Mississippi River. I liked some of the results from yesterday but there is always room for improvement. Identifying sandpipers is really not an easy task and any time I post a picture of a sandpiper species I would like to add a question mark. Most of them we see only during migration and this makes it difficult to have it spot-on every time. So if you are a birder that really knows about shorebirds and you disagree with my identification, please don’t hesitate to bring me back on the right track.
I saw several of the Pectoral Sandpipers in the Green Island Wetlands yesterday already but there were a lot more today and they were closer too. They have a really long journey to their breeding grounds. The Pectoral Sandpiper spends the winter in South America and breeds on arctic tundra from western Alaska across extreme north Canada. (source: iBirdPro app and NG Complete Birds of North America)
I talked about using “peak of action” in wildlife photography lately. The first image is a good example how it worked. Something took the bird’s attention for a brief moment, maybe there was a predator in the sky, and most of them interrupted their feeding frenzy and stopped for a few seconds. The shutter of the D300s was rattling… :-)