Monday, June 6, 2011

Spotted Redshank

I never did post pictures of all the birds I took during my trip to Switzerland back in late April. Not all are good enough to post, but I still have some interesting ones.
While I was at the BirdLife facility, I spent a lot of time in the three excellent bird blinds they provided. Each blind could accommodate several people and the birding was reasonably good. The biggest problem I had was that the sun was not at an ideal angle. Not only did it cause harsh foreshadows, but the glare also seemed to mess with my camera's sensor as the pictures turned out somewhat soft.
None-the-less, these images of a Spotted Redshank turned out pretty well. I followed the shore bird as it worked its way around the pond, eventually ending up right below the blind.
The facility provided pictures and some information on the back wall of the blind of many of the frequent birds one might see. A fellow bird photographer pointed out this one for me.
I tried to take pictures of all the images of birds that I saw to help me determine their identity. Only trouble is that none of the text was in English. The Swiss speak three languages; German, French and Italian. I think there was a little of each sprinkled throughout the images. Luckily it turned out to be easy to decipher as all I had to do is do a Google search on the name. Inevitably, the scientific name would be included in the text and I could search on that to find out the English name for the bird. I guess those weird Latin scientific names are good for something and this may be the reason why they are used.

1 comment:

  1. That's a very good point about the Latin names... Never really thought about it before. Cool bird!

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