Sunday, June 20, 2010

Green Heron

We walked the pond trail at the St. Olaf College nature area this evening and saw this Green Heron in a tree.



Green Herons are much smaller than the more commonly seen Great Blue Heron; they are similar in size to a crow.


 These shots were taken from quite a distance away -- maybe 70 yards or so -- through the spotting scope and represent my most successful digiscoping efforts so far with my new camera. It helps to be working with a bird the size of a crow (or green heron) rather than a tiny songbird.



This post is my submission for this week's Bird Photography Weekly.

6 comments:

Michael Moore | The Fridley Farmer said...

If you have any information on ways to invite more birds to your yard I would love to see a post on that. We live in Fridley and have(maybe, I'm not a birder) Cardinals, Bluejays, Robins, Gold finches, chicadees, sparrows and crows that come by.

I would love to invite more birds to the yard. We have a feeder but don't fill it anymore since squirrels were the main things emptying it. If bird houses help, I'd love to know what kinds you recommend!

Unknown said...

Thanks for the suggestion, Michael! I will plan a post on that subject.

eileeninmd said...

Great sighting, the Green heron is one of my favorite birds.

mick said...

Nice photos of an interesting bird. I'll be interested to see more of your digiscoping work and to hear how you manage with the smaller birds - that's always seemed as if it must be the hard part to me!

Unknown said...

@eileninmd: Thanks for visiting!

@Mick: Oh boy, I could write a long post about the frustrations of trying to get a good photo of a six-inch bird 50 or 100 yards away through the scope using a point-and-shoot camera with no manual focus. I have had occasional good luck, but most of my results are pretty bad.

NatureFootstep said...

I tried digiscoping but I never got this good photos as you got here. :(
I did not know this heron was that small. Thanks for the info.