Bird Photos...

Birds are a favorite photo subject here and just to catch up on the most recent things check this photo, made on Christmas morning as me and Morgan made a scouting trip to the highway 147 bridge area of Sam Rayburn Lake. These look to be canvasbacks, bag limit is one per man, laid to out of the wind near the bird island area where we do a lot of our late summer fishing. Water is low, you could probably walk out to hunt these birds but the open sand bar makes concealment of your intentions difficult considering the number of times these birds may have been shot at on the way down from Canada. Bunch a work for one bird apiece.

More migratory friends from the great lakes region photographed while fishing with cousin David are the American White Pelicans. Seen each year on Rayburn a little Internet research shows they eat 4 pounds of food a day including cat fish. There were 13 birds in this group, that's 52 pounds of fish, almost as much as I ate at the fish fry Monday evening. They also cooperate while fishing, chasing their prey into each other.

These look to be grebes. Peaceful little birds minding their own business, Swimmers and divers they can fall over on the land because their feet are too far back to balance. They can also adjust their feather angle to effect buoyancy, floating high or low in the water as needed.


Not sure of this bird, he's slipping along feeding on the shoreline of Lake Belton the frosty morning we hunted there. A little grainy because of cropping, I think the gray dawn light and the winter frost colors are exactly what my eye saw that day.