Tuesday, January 25, 2011 - Bosque Birdwatchers RV Park, San Antonio NM
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Mallards, Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, San Antonio NM, January 24, 2011
I have a few things to learn
After posting yesterday's picture of the Mallards and Wigeons I waded into my pictures from yesterday's shoot looking for some I could zoom in on to show off the bird's wonderful green iridescence that caught my eye in the reflected morning light as I was snapping away.
Well, the glow I thought I was capturing came out a little flat and mottled. Flat because the nature of digital photography doesn't capture the glow? Maybe, I'm not sure. But mottled by the sunlight reflecting off water droplets clinging to what looked from afar to be glistening smooth feathers. These guys were dabbling for breakfast and the droplets broke up the sheen I thought I was capturing.
But I got a few interesting shots anyway. It's such fun to shoot some pictures, only to find something entirely unexpected and wonderful in the images. Like this guy's reflection.
Iridescence is an optical phenomenon of surfaces in which hue changes in correspondence with the angle from which a surface is viewed.
Iridescence is often caused by multiple reflections from two or more semi-transparent surfaces in which phase shift and interference of the reflections modulates the incidental light (by amplifying or attenuating some frequencies more than others).
Conventional photography only records the specific effect of iridescence (not the phenomenon itself), just as it only captures the effect of three dimensions (representing them with two)...
Source: Wikipedia
Night camp
Site 10 - Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park, San Antonio NM
- This is a basic, small Mom & Pop RV Park with full hookups.
- Verizon cell phone and Broadband service are available here with a strong signal.
- Locate Bosque Bird Watcher's RV Park on my Night Camps map
- Click for Google street view
- Check the weather in San Antonio NM
Listening
As the poet Gary Snyder said so well, "Beyond all this studying and managing and calculating, there's another level to nature. You can go about learning the names of things and doing inventories of trees, bushes, and flowers. But nature often just flits by and is not easily seen in a hard, clear light. Our actual experience of many birds and wildlife is chancy and quick. Wildlife is known as a call, a cough in the dark, a shadow in the shrubs. You can watch a cougar on a wildlife video for hours, but the real cougar shows herself only once or twice in a lifetime. One must be tuned to hints and nuances." After more than thirty years of living in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and spending a great deal of that time out-of-doors, Snyder has seen the mountain lion on just a few occasions. One of these sightings was most unusual. Gary had been visiting a neighbor and was walking down from the nearby ridge to his home when he observed a cougar sitting near one of the windows of the house. The animal appeared to be listening intently as one of Snyder's stepdaughters practiced the piano.