Penguin Kite Aerial Photography II

Here are some more aerial photos taken with my kite set up. This is one of my all time favorite photos I have taken with the kite rig, mostly because of all the Antarctic elements found in the photo. Along the left side of the frame, running top to bottom is the upper reaches of the nearby beach of Admiralty Bay on King George Island. There you can see the scattered whale bones left over from the whaling days of the last century. The penguin colony in the center of the photo is an Adelie Penguin colony. Above this colony is the scattered nests of a group of Gentoo Penguins. Notice the much tighter density of the Adelie Penguins - probably an adaptation to nesting where there is usually much less exposed rocks to nest on with the rest of the area around the nesting colony usually covered in snow. I suspect that this colony is no longer even active given the declines in Adelie Penguins this far north. Just to the right of center is a skua flying over the colonies, most likely a Brown Skua (Stercorarius antarcticus) or Catharacta skua, C. lonnbergi, C. antarctica and C. maccormicki - take your pick (skua taxonomy is rather scattered).

I am standing in the snow in the lower right portion of the photo.  The numbers written into the photo denote where I had markers place for GPS locations to be taken later.

The photo below is a much larger Adelie Penguin colony at the same complex of penguin colonies on King George Island near the small U.S. Research base called Copa.This colony was never able to be accurately counted prior to my work because it was so large. Any guesses as to how many nests are in this colony?

Another photo of a couple of smaller colonies at Copa. I am standing just in the photo on the lower left.

 

One day we dropped the camera low over a Gentoo colony to observe the reaction of the birds. As you can see from the photo, they did not appear to even notice the kite and camera over them. I like the patterns radiating from the nest sites.

More Sage-Grouse videos

Here are a couple more videos of sage-grouse displaying and fighting. This time I am trying Vimeo to see if the video quality is a bit better.





The bonus question is "how many species of birds can be identified in the first video clip?"

Flatcoated Retriever - Addie

Greater Sage-Grouse in motion

My friend Clare at The House asked me a few years ago to post some video of my mornings at a sage-grouse lek. Well, I am finally getting it figured out now that my new camera also takes video. Here is my first attempt at editing and posting videos, but at least I finally got a grouse video to share. Learning how to edit will hopefully improve soon.

A land of light breezes

The wind blows a bit  around here.

These two buildings are found just north and east of Fort Peck.

I find the new Blogger editor extremely annoying, difficult, and frustrating. Adding text and photos is not very intuitive and I wind up with text all over the place with little ability to make it go where I want to in the post. Perhaps it is the Blogger template I am using that limits my editing options - I don't know. I guess now it is worth what I am paying to have my blog here.

Greater Sage-Grouse Dancing in the Moonlight

This was the photo I was hoping to re-create this spring. When I originally took this photo a few years ago, I didn't realize how difficult it would be to attempt to do again.

This year I looked at the moonset charts and figured out the one day that might work. It all worked fine except that I had wound up placing the blind too far to the south and the birds were not in line with the moon. The birds were there and the morning was gorgeous, but I was just out of place. Next year I guess.

The following photos are from a couple of mornings on a couple of different leks about 2 weeks ago. I can't believe that it has been two week already.

The birds were displaying with lots of activity well before sunrise, but the activity would slack off as the sun came up and the hens slowly departed the lek. One morning I was fortunate to have a few hens hang out on the lek well after sunrise, which prompted another round of vigorous displaying.

When the hens left, the fighting and staring at each other commenced.

 

Sage-Grouse Mornings

The last week or so have been filled with sage-grouse mornings. Most of them were rather disappointing - misplaced blinds, spooked birds, or poor light. This morning made up for all of the previous mornings though. Blind was placed just right and the birds cooperated and so did the light. It was probably the best morning I have had on a lek for taking photos (all mornings spent on a lek are hard to beat, no matter how well the photos turn out). Even better was that the lek I was on was one of the most recently discovered leks in Valley County and was discovered by two of my former interns/seasonal employees - Meagan and Amy and has also been a source for a number of birds marked for two research projects I initiated. I camped on near the lek and although it was a tad cold last night - about 20 degrees or so - the view of the sky last night more than made up for it. It is spectacular to look up when there isn't any artificial light to see from horizon to horizon. Just the stars.
More photos to follow.