Autumnal Albertan Avian Action

How’s that for a post title? 🙂

As readers of my blog posts will know, I particularly enjoy the fall season for all the gorgeous colors that it brings. Combine that with some of the most spectacular plumage to be found on any North American bird – such as the Wood Duck drake above – and you stand a good chance of ending up with some memorable images!

So to illustrate my point, here are some shots I took in late September and early October at Calgary’s Inglewood Bird Sanctuary that has recently re-opened after being closed for repairs since suffering significant damage during the flood of 2013. A number of Wood Ducks have taken up residence at the Sanctuary and in my opinion they are always a pleasure to see:

From a photographic point of view, I normally like to photograph waterfowl as close to pond-level as possible however in fall I depart from this rule in order to maximise both fall colours and reflections and tend to shoot from a standing position. At Inglewood, the lagoon has steep sides so it’s difficult to get really low anyway so this works out well.

The Wood Ducks are the Sanctuary tend to be rather skittish and keep their distance, so to get the extra reach I needed I used a Canon 7D Mk2 (with a crop-factor of 1.6) paired with a 1.4x teleconverter and a 600mm lens to give me an effective focal length of 1340mm! With good bright light I could keep the ISO around 800 or below and therefore capture relatively noise-free images.

Also enjoying Inglewood’s lagoon was a pair of Pied-billed Grebes:

I’m not sure whether they were juveniles or adults in their eclipse plumage, but they certainly liked to hang out together:

But even the more common birds, such as Canada Geese, look better with a little fall colour too:

And as I was heading back to my car a fellow park visitor pointed out a Great Horned Owl perched in a tree right next to the pathway so even though the light was poor I took a couple of portrait ‘potshots’ with my bazooka lens and was please that this one came out:

The Western Irrigation Canal which runs past Inglewood also offers good birding opportunities this time of year and I was pleased to see one of my favourite species – the Hooded Merganser – in reasonable numbers:

While the drake Hooded Merganser is undoubtedly striking, the female isn’t so shabby either:

The fishing must be good in the Canal as I have seen Double-crested Cormorants plying the waters like a submarine there on each of my visits:

…but it didn’t stay long:

Also of note was a dozen or so Long-billed Dowitchers perforating the mudflats – this was in the 2^nd week of October so seems quite late for these shorebirds to be coming through:

And of course where birds gather you will also find their predators, although I must admit I was somewhat surprised to find the Red Fox in the middle of the city!:

I expected him to have a crack at the many mallards or gulls on the shoreline, but he seemed more interested in digging something tasty out of the mud.

Finally, I’d like to share some shots of a not-so-common variation of a fairly common bird, namely a leucistic (a condition where there is partial loss of plumage pigmentation) American Robin:

This bird was in amongst the 50 or so robins at our campground in September and I must admit it took me a little while to ID the unusual-looking bird.

Cheers for now, Tim.