On Safari

 I recently shared a few similar images to the ones above but that was before I had a chance to edit them. I have only made very slight edits, mainly in terms of cropping the images where it was necessary and to make adjustments to the exposure.

I had watched a cormorant fishing and various other birds flying past but the black headed gull had clearly staked its claim over its territory in front of where I was sitting overlooking the lagoon. As another gull approached it would literally get into a flap and would noisily chase off any would be intruder. It was fun to watch and I thought the behaviour was quite strange too because at no point during the time I was watching did this bird catch anything to eat or pick at any scraps.

The lizard was one of several that I spotted in the hedge bordering the biennale gardens. This one had clearly found the perfect spot to soak up the afternoon sun. I was intrigued to note the texture and scaling on the tail was different to that on its body. I wondered whether this was due to it having grown back after shedding its tail in some previous conflict. Several of the other lizards I saw had similarly distinctive tails, so perhaps life for a lizard in Venice is full of hazard.

The egret was a real gem for me. I had been watching it sat on the railing of a pontoon about 20 metres away. I had imagined that if I tried to approach it to get a photo it would fly away and I did not want to disturb it. However, after some time I decided I would creep closer and see how it reacted, if appeared distressed I would leave it alone but if it remained calm I would take a few shots and then walk away. I could not believe my luck when it stayed settled, even when I was within about 4 metres from it. I am sure I could have got even closer had I wanted but it seemed neither fair nor necessary as I still managed to get some great shots.

Black Headed Gull

 This is a pretty common sight around out coastline, a black headed gull. "Black headed ?"you say, "surely not! " But yes, it is a non breeding adult, the black head you would expect to see is actually the breeding plumage.

This might seem a fairly boring subject for my blog pictures when there are more exciting species to go in search of, and to be honest I would much rather be photographing more exotic species. However wildlife photography involves a lot of patience and a lot of effort and sometimes you just have to shoot what is there. 

I had gone out onto the beach waiting for the tide to come in and to see the flocks of waders that come in ahead of the tide. It was a little further out than I had expected so as I waited I tried to get some practice with the gulls.

In the first image you can see that it was calling out, maybe a warning to keep my distance, look at that long floppy tongue. In the second image it had walked a little further away before launching into the air as flying away as you can see in the final image.

Winter Plumage

This is an adult Black Headed Gull in winter plumage. Because it was such a grey day and because the plumage is white and shades of grey I decided to to shoot this in black and white which I think really works well. 

The only problem with that is we miss the only bit of colour which is the scarlet beak (also tipped with black) and so to give added value here is a cropped image of the beak, in glorious colour...