Go to the New Site!

Remember folks, this address is old. . . the new site is http://www.JaredLloydphoto.com

be there or be square

www.JaredLloydphoto.com

OK folks, after so many months of my primary sight being down, I have a new one back up. Its certainly a work in progress as I slowly but surely tackle the different design features that I want to implement. At the moment my photo journal is the front page there. Over the next couple weeks that sight will become the hub of all my sites and services simply combined into one. Bare with me as I get it fully functional. From this point on though, this will be my last post at THIS address. The new site is simply www.JaredLloydphoto.com

Harbor Seals of the Outer Banks

Back in November a seal was spotted down on Hatteras Island. People got excited. This was a bit early for the seals, but heck, the humpback whales were migrating by all the way back at the beginning of October. Maybe things were just moving early this year. Well, after that first sighting things were pretty quiet until around Christmas when there was another report. At last, the seals are no longer just a third hand rumor here on the beach. As of last week it would seem that they are here in full force and are popping up on the beaches every day.

Since the reports started rolling in I have been running up and down the Banks in search of seals. Often times however the seals haul out for a quick rest and then back in they go. This means that if your not Jonny on the spot, than you stand a good chance of missing them. Other seals however will haul out for 24 hours or more and then hang out in the same area for weeks or months on end. This was the case with a seal down on Cape Point last year. This is also par for the course on Cora June Island in Hatteras Inlet – which will be a kayak trip for me very soon for this reason.

Why the seals are showing up on our beaches is still something of a mystery. This is all really new stuff for us here. Typically, it was thought that seals home range was Canada and Maine. Then it became Canada and New England with an odd sighting of a pup down in far as Virginia or North Carolina. This is what most of the guide books still claim. However, this is no longer the case as each year the sightings continue to grow. Here on the Outer Banks, folks have even had to organize a Marine Mammal Stranding Network to deal with the sudden influx of seals in the winter.

Lets face it, a baby seal is pretty cute. And it is this cuteness that can really get these guys and people into trouble. While I was photographing this 2-year-old pup I was asked no less than 5 times by folks who happened by if they were allowed to pet it. PET IT!? These guys bite, and if you get bitten the state is required by law to destroy the animal in order to test if for rabies. Really bad idea. This is why education is one of the primary goals of the Marine Mammal Stranding Network.

Now as to exactly why the number of seals here in the winter are growing exponentially, no body knows for sure, but there are a number of theories. One of the dominant theories at the moment is actually quality of beaches. As the New England area is home to one of the largest fishing industries in the world, mortality rates are high due to entanglements, and food sources are dwindling. The idea here being that seals are beginning to move south to find a safer place to live with more abundant food. With that said however, on our beaches we are still only seeing the pups though.

Now its a well-known fact that seal pups will roam far and wide in search of food – much further than their adult counterparts. But there is now speculation that a full-blown seal rookery could be developing on one of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel islands. If this is the case, North Carolina’s beaches would certainly be within reach of harbor seal pups that are birthed there. This is still yet to be seen but it is intriguing.

Here are a couple from a harbor seal pup that hauled out of the water in Kill Devil Hills yesterday afternoon.

Fire and Ice

Its been cold lately. I mean really cold. By southern standards, its been arctic cold. And as you would expect when temperatures plummet to below freezing for several days, everything has been frozen solid. In regards to waterfowl, this means that instead of being spread out across a large area of great habitat, the birds are concentrated into pockets of open water. This of course can be good, or it can be bad. If I were photographing in a waterfowl impoundment in this situation, like any duck hunter, I would be in the water/ ice an hour and a half before sunrise breaking up a big hole right in front of my blind. But considering lake Mattamsukeet is off-limits as far as getting into the water this time of year, if you don’t have access to an open hole, you can pretty much forget about all the best places for photographing swans.

With all of that said however, one thing most people never get to see is how that when ice has formed along side of the causeway, this ice will light up on fire at sunrise. Now this presents a number of options photographically. You can of course make abstract shots with the patterns of colors in the ice – which you can see in the photos I have included; you can try to workout a landscape with the colors of sunrise and silhouettes of cypress trees, or you can patrol the causeway to try and find an open pocket of water which will most assuredly have swans and ducks standing around on the ice next to it.

Sitting along the southeastern edge of the causeway was the mother load of ducks, geese, and swans. a large pocket of open water extended up along the bank here where food is most plentiful. Once I located this place – before sunrise of course – it was then simply a matter of trying to find compositions of birds that would look well silhouetted against the orange ice and then waiting for the sun to rise and then the birds to move around a bit.

The Skies Darkened

I’ve have always felt cheated out of this Earth’s great wonders by being born to my generation. I read the accounts of William Bartram, John Lawson, the first expeditions to the Carolina coast, those first explorers to set foot upon a continent teeming with wildlife in such numbers as to quite often make up the lion’s share of those accounts of first contact. Oyster’s were once so plentiful in both the Chesapeake Bay and the Carolina sounds, that the entire bodies of water were filtered daily by these most useful bivalves. It was said that by spending a mere hour fishing in these waters a family could be fattened for a week. By no means was this continent “untouched” by man, as the Native American’s routinely shaped, sculpted, and regimented the landscape to suite their needs. However, in comparison to today’s standards, in comparison even to European standards in the 15th century this land was a Garden of Eden.

Where I live the birds come in force over the course of winter. As old man winter’s icy fingers stretch out across the arctic and northern states, birds are forced to push south in search of food for survival. It was during these migrations that explorers and colonists were thunderstruck by the awesome experience of watching several million birds soar overhead, blackening the skies for what would seem like hours. Today, such numbers are incomprehensible to us. We live only to see the children of those few survivors that somehow escaped the wholesale slaughter of industrial / market hunting. Be it meat for the table or plumes for women’s hats, nearly every bird of even marginal aesthetics were gunned down for the all mighty dollar. Brown pelicans were reduced to a single breeding colony off Florida. Egrets and herons alike were pushed to the edge of extinction, becoming non-existent in states north of Florida. This was how the Audubon society came about. This is why every town in the south is a posted bird sanctuary now.

Despite the onslaught of western civilization’s unclenching thirst for money and prestige, some of these birds did survive. In conjunction with modern-day game laws and a slight shift in cultural norms and ethics, many of these once great species are in deed rebuilding their numbers. Of course, just as many are still racing towards obliteration. However, those that have survived our presence here, those that have benefited from 20th century laws and regulations, now once again migrate by the tens of thousands – if not millions. Still a pale comparison to historical numbers, but progress all the same.

Researchers have long since claimed that the notion of flyways to explain migration routes by birds was far to simplified. Bird banding studies over the last half century have revealed a complexity of migration and individual variation that ornithologists have still yet to wrap their minds around what is going on. With that said though, the flyways concept still applies to basic understanding of migration in that the vast majority of birds in general tend to stick to these given routes. Being from eastern North Carolina, this is relevant to my photography as we still harbor innumerable birds over the winter.

The National Wildlife Refuge system has for the most part become the favored destinations for many of these migrating species here in Carolina. Other areas, for the waterfowl that is, the birds are hunted extensively and therefore those species have learned to refuge hop over the last few generations. Those that immediately come to mind are places like Pea Island NWR where 1,700 tundra swans and hundreds of thousands of ducks take rest either for the duration of the winter or long enough to rebuild fat stores in order to make the next leg of their journey. Lake Mattamuskeet NWR is another such oasis with tens of thousands of swans (eastern North Carolina winters 75% of the entire eastern population of tundra swans) and ducks in the millions. Poccosin Lakes NWR is the third major refuge in the area for winter stop overs in terms of swans, snow geese, and red-winged blackbirds.

Poccosin will, this time of year, typically hold 50 – 100,000 snow geese. Traditionally this was not the case of course. But with the extensive agriculture – corn – on the property for the sole benefit of wildlife, the geese now call this place home. This is something of a modern day phenomenon in general for the snow goose and has both helped its numbers rebound by learning to exploit our industrial agriculture, while at the same time firmly placing themselves in the minds of many as a nuisance and destructive species. Numbering in the millions and growing exponentially due to the endless food supply of America’s grain crops, the snow goose in one success story that many feel will blow up in our faces.

Inspired by a fellow wildlife photographers abstract rendition of a black snake, I decided to spend yesterday working on wildlife abstracts myself. The first place that come to mind for such a project was Poccosin Lakes. When I want swans, I got to Mattamuskeet. When I want ducks, I go to Cape Hatteras National Seashore and managed waterfowl impoundments, when I want geese however, I go to Poccosin. With this intention I left my house at around 4 am to make the 2 hour drive.

I found the geese almost immediately and worked them for an hour or so before the flock finally headed off to the back fields of the refuge. As I began to make my way around the dirt roads to try to access the North road where they few off too, I noticed the red-winged blackbirds and about 20 bald eagles and 10 or more norther harriers. Migration axiom number one: where there are large concentrations of small birds, there will be large concentrations of raptors to feed on the small birds. These black birds engulfed much of the field. The ground stretching out a  hundred yards in all directions was black with them. Even the trees sticking out into the field like a peninsula were black with birds. When you see numbers of birds like this, its difficult to quantify what you are seeing of course. Is a million birds an exaggeration? Or, is it a mere fraction of what you behold? Lets just say, there were a lot of birds.

Now how these birds feed and move is naturally in waves when they congregate on the fields like this. Just like the snow geese, the redwings will constantly roll over top of themselves in waves as they move to the center of the flock. It doesn’t take long to understand why they do this, and why they are constantly jockying for a central spot surrounded by others. It’s like all animals the group up like this for the most part – dilution. The more birds, elk, caribou, fish, etc. .  that are around you, the more likely one of them will be eaten instead of you. Obviously then, the closer you are to the center, the safer you are from predators. The trade-off though is that the more birds you are with, the more predators. But this is something of a necessary evil as winter is also the time for mate selection for many species of birds. To go it alone, would be to never sire offspring; to be an evolutionary loser in the game of life and the continuation of your species.

Such extraordinary numbers of birds lends itself well to creating abstract photographs. The creative options are seemingly limitless. Fast shutters for freeze frame, slow shutters for blur and motion, focusing at different depths within the flock, etc. . . All you need is timing and the time to experiment. Well one good thing about the bald eagles in the area (other than something else to photograph) is that when they dive the birds, the redwings explode into the air in a towering ink black mass complete with their red shoulder patches in threat display. Thus, if you watch the raptors, you will know when to get ready for a show – its as simple as that.

Here are a few photographs from the day. . . Still have 16 gigs worth of files to go through though.

Pea Island Snow Geese

As is the case most mornings that I am out photographing, the alarm went off at 4:00 am and I was on the road by 4:30. My original destination was to be Poccosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge to photograph geese storms – you know, the photographs of 50,000 geese taking off at once. Just before I was to leave the island, it dawned on me that I hadn’t been down to Pea Island National Wildlife Refuge in over a month. The last time I was there, not many birds (waterfowl) had really made it in there yet. Considering the sudden explosion of birds elsewhere however, it seemed safe to assume that Pea Island would be holding now as well.

I was pulling up along side of the waterfowl impounments about an hour before sunrise and already I could make out a few hundred swans out on the water. Their distinctive cooing and hoots filled the predawn sky and made them hard to miss. This was a good sign. Once the swans have arrived in mass at Pea Island, the greater snow goose has as well. And really, when it comes to photographing birds at this National Wildlife Refuge in the winter time, snow geese are the only reason I make the drive down.

Sure there are tens of thousands of birds out on the impoundments at Pea Island, but access is very limited here. There is a hiking trail around what is called the North Pond, and there is even a photo blind here, but the real action is to be had just to the south in the impoundments that are off-limits to us humans. This makes photography extremely difficult this time of year as ducks are very small creatures and therefore you have to be right on top of them often times in order to make succesful photographs of them.The swans, though many, routinely stay out in the middle of the impoundments or along the western boundary away from the road. This means that the only species of waterfowl that is truly accessible here are the snow geese.

As the greater snow goose is a dabbling species that prefers to much around in extremely shallow water or better yet, a wet meadow, these geese tend to be concentrated within 40 yards of the road side. This side of the impoundments are very shallow with a gentle slope from the roadside that turns into wet meadows and marsh habitats. As the impoundment progresses to the west, it gets deeper, culminating in a dyke along the soundside (western) border. This is why Pea Island can be such a tease. You stand along the road looking out at a raft of oh say 1,000 redheads or canvasbacks but considering these are diving species, they are on the wrong side of the impoundment. Now if you want to photograph geese however, the situation is almost perfect.

In the winter the typical winds out here on the barrier islands are out of the North. This means Northwest or Northeast. Now a northwest wind is a great wind because it usually brings in new birds to the area and really gets the birds jumping around a lot. This is for a good reason as they are usually associated with cold fronts. A northeast wind can be good, or it can wash your house away and open up a new inlet in the middle of the islands. It just depends on how long it blows.

Considering birds typically take off and land into the wind so as to exploit the lifting and breaking potential of the wind, knowing where the wind will be blowing before you come out is always a good thing. My personal favorite time to photograph these geese here is early morning with a northeast wind at around 20 mph. This is strong enough to concentrate the birds into tight groups. This is strong enough to keep them tight against the bank. But really the key here is the combination of the angle of sunlight and the direction that birds will be facing when they land.

As it is winter, the sun rises in the southeast. Along this strip of sand it feels more like south-southeast really. This is great in that if you’re facing north, than you have the sun right over your shoulder which is the optimal direction for photographing birds in flight. The only problem here though is that with the wind blowing out of the north, the birds will be facing away from you giving plenty of opportunities to photograph their butts but little else except as they whiz by you. This is where the northeast wind kicks in. Since the birds will be landing in an easterly direction, and the sun is rising up out of the southeast, the birds will be perfectly illuminated from the side. This means heads, bodies, wings, etc. . . all bathed in that beautiful glow of early morning light. A strong southeast wind would bring the birds landing directly into the sun, which would be great, but rarely happens here in the winter.

So with a northeast wind you are going to want to position your vehicle southeast of the birds – for reasons that I have explained above. For a northwest wind however, I prefer to be northeast of the birds as this will allow me to see their faces. This becomes tricky in the since that often times the face of the bird is hidden in shadows and timing or bird angle has to be just right in order to illuminate the face.  But hey, thats wildlife photography right?

Here are a couple photographs from today, with a northwest wind. Note the bird landing angled away from me.

Snow Geese, another visitor from the far North

What is it that I truly love about winter here despite the lack of snow? Well if you havnt guessed it for yourself just yet, its the waterfowl. For starters its what makes the Outer Banks and eastern North Carolina so unique this time of year. Its what has shaped the human history and even economic development of much of this region. Its what towns are named after and the schools in those town are named after famous ducker hunters that were from there.

Well being that this is eastern North Carolina, swans are not the only game in town this time of year. In facet, another species that is just as visible and comes in even greater numbers each year are the snow geese. If Mattamuskeet has 10,000 swans right now, than you can be sure that places like Poccosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge right next door will have 60,000 snow geese piled up in the corn fields feeding on grain.

Now historically, the snow goose was one of the primary drivers of our economy. People came from all across the East to hunt these birds here. However, as numbers have rebounded, winters have warmed, and agricultural feilds hold so much food even up north, the majority of these birds began short stopping a few decades ago. Instead of the Outer Banks, the began stopping at the Eastern Shore along the Virginia / Maryland border. Now however, there is some evidence that suggests we may be witnessing yet another shift in major wintering grounds once again – this time in to Pensilvania. Only time will tell though and the verdict is still out on this one.

Blind Shyness And Lessons On Blending In

For the past several days I have been photographing exclusively at lake Mattamsukeet National Wildlife Refuge. As the swans have begun to return in mass, the action has picked up to a fever pitch out there. One problem that any photographer who attempts to photograph the waterfowl in this area is faced with however, is that these birds are hunted to no end and therefore very wary of people and anything out of the ordinary. From thier nesting grounds to North Carolina, these birds probably move through three seperate hunting seasons. Even here on Mattamuskeet there are schedualed hunts. All of this combines to create a potentially challenging situation for photographers.

Now dont get me wrong, there really are so many birds here that you cannot come to Mattamuskeet and not walk away with photographs of swans – as well as deer and even bald eagles for that matter. But in order to take your photographs up to the next notch, you have to get close, and you in my opinion, you have to get low.

My entry in this photojournal today can be compared to my last entry as I was photographing from the same spot but from a different perspective and weahter conditions. With my last entry, the photographs were all made from sitting down inside of an Ameristep chair blind. This put my lens just a few feet above the water level and really brought out the bordering swamp as a  background to the phtographs. In this current entry however, I was moved back about 30 feet to a higher elevation – my lense probably being 7 feet above the water. In these photographs, I lose the forest as a background and instead have only the water itself to work with.

The reason that I made this change though was due to the skittishness of the birds. Even with my blind pushed back up into the edge of the dead phragmites and zipped up with only my lens hood (which is camoflauged) sticking outside of the blind, the birds were still very wary of my presence. I watched as flock after flock began to fly in, only to notice my blind and flair back out to open water and move around me. I have always had great success with this blind and so at first I couldnt understand what was going on and even if it was really the blind that was spooking them. Then, a great egret started to fly and and land about 10 feet in front of me. When the bird looked right at me and started squaking as it flew off, I knew what the problem was.

That evening I spoke with a couple old school duck hunters from the area about birds being blind shy. They told me that quite often people speak of ducks near the end of the season as being decoy shy, but from their experience its really blind shyness and that if you remove the blind, often the birds will come back into the same spread of decoys they were seemingly flairing from to begin with.

When it comes to photographing wild waterfowl, duck hunters should be your mentor and your best friend. They are the onese who have mastered the art of luring in these wary birds for centuries if not melinia. When people talk of hunters, waterfowl hunters carry a certain mistique – even more so I think than the big game hunters. People use words like obssession to describe thier past time. Food bases, what birds are eatingwhen the first arrive and what they are eating before the leave, migration routes, lunar impact upon migrations, drought conditions of areas thousand of miles away, breeding cycles,  etc. . .  What other sport hunter goes so in depth with their understanding  of ecology, biology, and natural history of thier querry now a days? So like hunting these birds, if you want to photograph them you have to know as much as there is to know about the birds, and you cannot simply walk up to the side of the road and expect to make award winning photographs of them. There is a good reason that waterfowl hunters have decoys, calls, waders, camoflauge, and spend days working to perfect thier hunting blinds before the birds begin to arrive.

What all of these means then, is that even though I was concealed in a blind, it just wasnt good enough. The blind was far to conspicous to these waterfowl. After learning of birds becoming blind shy like this, I set mine up and studied it. First off, it has a slight sheen to the fabric. This means of the light hits it right the blind will be illuminated. Second, its too dark for the phragmites. I have photographed waterfowl from this blind many times before, but not with such a uniformly light tan background as these phragmites. I probably looked like a giant glistening bear with knife and fork in hand to these birds. Or maybe I just looked like the last thing that killed a few of thier friends. Eitherway, these birds were spooking.

So the solution? I will be picking up a couple mats of shadow grass and a thing of burlap this week. The burlap is light and can be spray painted with cattails and phragmites used as stencils to create the perception of depth. The shadow grass on the other hand will make me completely disappear into the dead phragmites, but is really heavy and a burden to tote around. Where I photograph in Mattamuskeet, I can simply cart my gear (with one of those fishing gear carts you see people using on piers) to the area and then just stash the cart. Elsewhere, when I need to done waders and trudge belly deep through the water, I can float the burlap along with the rest of my gear in a large mortar mixing tub with a rope attached to it. This actually works great because it keeps your stuff dry even if you take a fall in the water.

Tundra Swans of Mattamuskeet

Once again the frigid cold fronts that swept through the last week brought pay dirt to our area in the form of waterfowl.  The eastern population of the Tundra Swan – formally known as the whistling swan – is roughly 100,000. Of this total population it is estimated that a full 75% of these birds winter right here in eastern North Carolina. The vast majority of these birds, the largest of all the swans in North America, can be found at Lake Mattamuskeet National Wildlife Refuge each winter. The refuge this time of year is a sight to behold for sure.

Looking out across the water of North Carolina’s largest natural lake, it would seem as though you could simply walk across Mattamuskeet on the backs of so many thousands of swans. The congregation of these birds is almost overwhelming as this place probably holds the largest concentration of these birds in America. This is a wintertime phenomenon however, as up on the tundra during the breeding season these birds are spread out in pairs across thousands of miles of barren grounds. These sort of mass congregations occur only on the wintering grounds and ornithologists believe that the purpose of these massive gathering areas is for better mate selection. Once again, migration is about food and sex. And when it comes to a providing enough food in a natural habitat for some 40,000 swans to gather in order to find a mate, this lake is just as good as it gets. At 18 miles long and 7 miles wide with an average depth of only around 2 feet deep, this place is a full on Golden Corral buffet for waterfowl in the wintertime.

Swans in Flight.

 

Long before folks were coming to the Outer Banks to sunburn along the windswept white sandy beaches of these barrier islands, they came for the birds. Well, they came for the waterfowl that is – ducks, geese, and swans. Upon the close of the Civil War, so many union soldiers trekked back into the Northeast with tales of the natural bounty that was to be found along the sound counties of eastern North Carolina. Fish that would practically leap into your boat, deer and bears that grew fat from eating all year-long without having to hibernate, and waterfowl that blackened out the sky as they migrated to the region. These were the stories that would garnish the attention of sportsmen the world over.

There is a really good reason why eastern North Carolina has long been famous for its waterfowl populations. From the Great Lakes, the Hudson Bay, all the way out to Nova Scotia, the migration routes of waterfowl and other migratory birds swing south across the continent only to converge like so many strands of rope overtop of eastern Carolina. This is the Atlantic Flyway, and this is the sort of virtual super highway used by countless birds in their fall migrations. And why congregate overtop of eastern Carolina? Food. It’s what migration is all about.

One of the unique characteristics of North Carolina’s sounds are their shallow depths. For the Curituck, the average depth is only around 4 feet. What this means then, is that sunlight can penetrate the water all the way down to the sand, mud, or loam at the bottom. For this reason, what is known as submergant aquatic vegetation proliferates – much to the dismay of many a boater who has been forced to unfoul a prop while still on the water.

This submergant aquatic vegetation or SAV for short is comprised of everything from the native wigeon grass to the non native Eurasian millfoil. Regardless of the name or origin, the waterfowl love it and come by the millions each fall to exploit it. Therefore, beginning sometime around November, as food begins to grow scarce further north, the swans arrive.

This year has been pretty slow so far. The north has not been hit too hard with many major cold fronts and freezes and due to the enormous amount of rain experienced all across the East, suitable habitat and food sources abound without making it all the way to the Curituck Sound and points beyond. Hopefully though, the cold front that numbed my fingers and chilled my bones this weekend will be the change we’ve been waiting for. As the winds picked up and the mercury plummeted, the waterfowl began to arrive.

These photos were taken from Knotts Island on Saturday morning as I watched wave after wave of these swans come filtering in out of the northern horizon. Once the first swans gathered in the waterfowl impoundments at the Mackey Island National Wildlife Refuge, the population began to grow exponentially. As the old saying goes, nothing attracts a crowd quite like a crowd. Which I might add, is one theory as to why so many large birds like this are indeed white – so that other flocks are easier to find from the sky.