Birds the word

My mom, sister, and I were down in Florida for a cousin's wedding. On Saturday we drove down to Key Largo for the day, went to Pennekampe state park and went on a reef tour... unfortunately I didn't get many pictures from that since I was busy being seasick.

Later in the day we went to a bird sanctuary not far from the state park. Beside the birds they were rehabilitating, they also feed the local wild birds... so there were huge water birds just about everywhere.

We were on a little crowded boardwalk, so I couldn't always get the best angle and the lighting wasn't always great, but I think I got some good shots.

Oh, if someone could identify some of these for me, I'd really appreciate it... I recognized pelicans, that was about it.

I LOVE that last picture, the one of the bird perched on the branch...that's awesome! The white of the bird against the sky is perfect. :) My only nitpick is actually with my fave part, which is the feet...I love the way its toes are curled around the branch, but I wish they were a little more in focus!

Cool pics though!
Emily

GREAT shots. I really like these. The blue sky makes a great bg for the white bird, like Emily said. You did very well with the backlit subjects, I can never manage to capture backlit subjects with the type of glow that you got. Good framing on the pelican too. Just an all around great set of images. And that's saying something, since a lot of the time I don't have only positive things to say. I'm a harsh critic. Well done, and keep up the good shooting.

Nice pics. The first two are White Morphs of the Great Blue Heron. They are very similar to Great Egrets, but have darker, heavier, bills and are common in the Keys. Do you have any showing the legs? The White Morph of the GBH has grayish yellow legs. The Great Egret has black legs.

Your last picture is a Snowy Egret.

They're really good .... all three are pretty and show the natural beauty of the bird. I am not sure any of them are great shots - don't get me wrong, these are good - but it's just hard to get a contest winning shot with subjects like this. (I have the same opinion of boat photos - hard to get a really great one.) I think that the bird would have to do something unusual or have a really different background, or it would have to be fighting with another bird over a fish, something like that. That's hard to capture, but maybe one could throw out some fish to them and see what occurs?

I wonder if this bird ever closes its eyes btw.
GB