Oh Canada!

(July 23rd) I was delighted to get the chance to travel to Canada for a week. Quite a bit of preparation went into planning this trip. After I got off the plane I was forced to stay in the hotel I had reserved - and they told me that there was no hot water. Let me just say that taking a shower with frigid water after 3 hours of sleep is one of the most miserable experiences. It was quickly out of my mind when I got to my first stop, Elk Island National Park, and started shooting a large buffalo herd.

Next I made my way to the lakeshore which is supposed to be a great place to watch nesting Red-necked Grebes. Well there were a lot of the grebes there, but since the chicks had grown to the size where they could leave the nests, they were all far off into the distant waters of the lake. But I did find a group of resting gulls and terns on the lakeshore. The terns were Forster's tern like this adult.

To get close to the gulls and terns, I crawled on my knees for a hundred feet and then inched along on my belly for another hundred feet. Fortunately it was still early enough in the morning that there were no witnesses around to this unsightly process. If you watch the birds' behavior and act appropriately this will let you get nice and close (these birds are definitely not like the tame gulls you often find at beaches). Gulls like these Bonaparte's Gulls are always great fun to photograph. They always give you great poses and often great behaviors.