photoartflightSnowy Egrets From St. Augustine Alligator Farm
Because of the Covid 19 restrictions we have not traveled from home. I was going through images from a trip last January to Florida. The images used here were taken at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm & Rookery. It was a Great photo destination and they seem to cater to photographers. With a membership, they offer early hours to photographers& it can get very crowded in some of the areas. The Rookery area has a boardwalk going through it above the water & the alligators. It attracts a lot of photographers because there are so many nesting birds in the trees in the Rookery. The alligators provide protection to the birds’ nests in the trees above the water & the gators. I also saw quite a few birds walking on the shoreline by the alligators. I guess they are well feed since they seemed to leave the birds alone. I was using a Tamron 150-600mm lens on a Canon R which was a perfect combination to photograph there. I Since you are in a large gated boardwalk area it was nice to not lug too much gear around with all the photographers, tripods & other visitors. Usually I do not like photographing in commercial wildlife areas, but it was a nice area with nice people running the Alligator Farm. These are images I did not post before. The featured image was taken @ 600mm with the Canon R.
photoartflight 
Amazing feathers and stunning pics!
Thanks so much Hans! They are fun to photograph!
You photographed some terrific poses. Very nice, Reed!
Thanks Belinda! I never saw so many birds in one area! Must have been way over a hundred. Plus photographing nesting birds was a treat. I just concentrated on Snowy Egrets for this post, but there was a wide variety of birds in the rookery. They would just fly in and out in waves all day long. Plus the noise they made was very interesting! These were all shot from the walkway going through the rookery. The 150-600mm zoom was a great lens to use there and was surprisingly very sharp! I even had to shoot multi-image pano shots at 150mm to be able to get the whole nest with birds for one final pano image. Will post some of those soon. The birds have nests everywhere in the rookery and seem to feel safe because the alligators below take care of any animals coming into the rookery to try to get to the chicks in the nests.
It sounds wonderful. I look forward to more!
Such beautiful birds and to think how close we came to wiping them out for their feathers – too close. Wonderful captures, Reed!
Thanks Eliza! They were fun to see interacting with each other. Plus they were quite “vocal” so it was interesting to hear all the bird’s making a racket!
Your photos of SNOWY EGRETS are fascinating!
Thanks so much Isabel! It was an amazing place to photograph birds! I will be posting many more from this location in the future.
Great shots of one of the most beautiful birds, Reed. I’ve never seen a wader of any species on a nest so that was cool.
Thanks Steve! It was an amazing rookery to photograph! Plus so many birds nest there because the alligators take out the birds predators before they would get to climb up the trees. At least that is what they told us!
Beautiful shots Reed!
Thanks Donna! It was an amazing place to photograph! About 11 months since we were there and still going through some of the images!
Florida does that too ya! 😉