Snowy Egret

I woke up at 5:30 and was on the road by 6:30 in hopes of catching a Florida sunrise. There were no clouds and the sunrise was nothing to write home about. So I continued driving and went to a wildlife preserve. The lady that ran the place recommended that I go to the city dump in Punta Gorda if I wanted to get great bird shots. So off I went and was amazed at how many birds were there including thousands of seagulls, vultures, herons of different varieties, bald eagles, and a bunch of other birds that I've never seen before. I got some great pictures and wanted to stay longer, but the aroma was just a little bit more than I could take.

So I headed over to Gasparilla Island which is probably one of the most beautiful spots in Florida. Beautiful homes, perfect landscaping, sandy white beaches, and wonderfully clear blue water. There was a nice breeze and temperatures were in the mid-eighties with very low humidity - Perfection!

We headed back to Venice Beach in the early afternoon to meet up with the family for a late lunch. Afterwards, we hung out at the house for a couple of hours (I spent a good amount of time photographing lizards in the front yard.), and then headed over to the beach to watch the sun set. When we got there, there were a bunch of fisherman on the pier along with herons and snowy egrets.

One fisherman had a clear container with live shrimp that he was using for bait. The snowy egrets were all standing around the container pecking at the plastic container trying to get at them. I approached the egrets slowly and sat down about 6 inches from the container. The Egrets apparently are not afraid of people and were all around me trying to get at the shrimp. I fired off about 50 pictures and had an unusually high failure rate because the birds were too close! The fisherman gave me some of the live shrimp and used them as "bait" to get the birds a little bit further away so that I could get some decent pictures.

I ended up with about 30 pictures that were definite keepers and then went through the painful process of deciding which one to post here. I liked this one because the Egret ruffled it's feathers when another Egret tried to get the shrimp that I just tossed over.

The sunset was gorgeous and was a perfect way to end a perfect day.

Thank you all for all of your comments, stars, and favorites for my 365th blip yesterday and for sending my birdie to the spotlight page. This blip officially marks my 1 year anniversary (compensating for leap year of course. Off to breakfast now and then heading to Tampa later this morning.

Have a great day!