Birds Galore at Magnolia Cemetery!

 

The photographer got photographed on Nov. 8 at Magnolia Cemetery! 

Gary Eaton snapped this image of me doing my thing from my perch on the bridge. A few years ago Gary founded the popular Facebook site “Magnolia Cemetery Photographer’s Group.” I was pleased to meet Gary on this day as well as another photographer named Catherine. 

There were quite a few birds to see from the long bridge at Magnolia Cemetery. Here are a pair of Wood Storks, a trio of White Ibis and a Black-crowned Night Heron. 

It had been a while since I’d seen a Black-crowned Night Heron. 

ACE Basin Getaway

My Spring Break from school has been a busy one but I was determined to take one day for an excursion to the Lowcountry’s ACE Basin. This is the land of vast nature preserves, a protected watershed region totalling some 1.6 million acres.

On Wednesday I drove south the 60 miles or so to the Bear Island Wildlife Management Area. As this site claims (accurately!) Bear Island is a birdwatcher's paradise.

Here can be explored the 18th and 19th-century rice fields that brought wealth to plantation owners and enslavement to Africans brought (and bought) to toil in swampy waterways like this one. 

Wooden trunks like these continue to be used to control water levels in the former rice fields of the ACE Basin whose name comes from the confluence of the Ashepoo, Combahee and Edisto Rivers. 

These are happy places for me full of seemingly endless walking and driving trails that lead to waterways where birds of all shapes and sizes may be found. You will also see alligators and sometimes snakes, lizards, raccoons, deer, wild hogs and other land animals. 

Two other wonderlands in this area, similar in layout to Bear Island, are the Donnelley WMA and the Ernest Hollings National Wildlife Refuge. 

My blog documents numerous visits to these great places. See the above links and/or go to search this blog space in the column on the right.

Chesapeake Bay Birding (and One Easter Bunny)

Easter time was our first getaway trip since a visit to Hilton Head last summer. It was nice to take in some different scenery (even Pedro at South of the Border!) and great to see family again. The Virginia side of the Chesapeake Bay, where my parents live, is a pretty, quiet place with opportunities to satisfy my inner birder. 

At the folks’ house, I need to go no farther than their backyard to see this Osprey platform. It has been here for years and my father had a hand in getting it erected. During this visit, a family of Osprey was in residence. The parents were still working on the nest. A few times I saw one swoop down to a nearby yard to grab a branch or twig. Pinecones could also be seen on the structure, though as my father noted they wouldn’t be too comfortable as bedding for the big birds. 

It is always challenging to shoot from a great distance and to get good shots of birds in flight. Here are my best  images...