Bird Photography at Fort De Soto
While Ray and I were in Florida, he mentioned something about Royal Terns and never seeing their courtship, or seeing them in breeding plumage. So I did a quick google search for Where do Royal Terns nest, and came up with Fort de Soto and Huguenot Memorial Park. After leaving the Orlando area, we decided to go to Fort de Soto. Our plans are constantly changing when we don’t have a strict timeline or anything booked. It’s almost too easy to decide in a split second to completely change our direction, because its just that easy to just start driving… Sometimes it can be a wonderful thing, and sometimes it gets us in this travel mode where we start overdoing it. Everything that we might want to see is only a couple hours away, and it’s easy enough to just keep going from one place to the next, however then we stay constantly on the move and never really feel grounded. Our approach that we prefer is to find a great place and stay for a while, anywhere between 5 days and 2 weeks. This is much easier to do when we’re out on the west coast where there is so much available BLM land to camp on for a minimal charge or for free, but that practically doesn’t exist on the east coast. It can get very costly having to pay for a campground each night, or much less glamorous spending nights in Cracker Barrels and Walmart, which we do plenty of while on the east coast.
Anyway— back to our experience of staying at Fort de Soto. We got lucky and grabbed two nights at the campground. The last time we were in the area was a couple of years ago during winter, and during red tide! So Ray never got to fully experience Fort de Soto in all its glory! However this time, our first steps on to the beach, we were graced with a White Morph Reddish Egret! What a delight! I had never seen one in multiple trips spanning over multiple years of visits, and there it was! Absolutely gorgeous bird! And over the next few days, we had multiple close encounters with it.
There were also flocks of Royal Terns, some sandwich terns, piping plovers, dowitchers, sanderlings, willets, semi palmated plovers, snowy plovers, Wilson’s plovers, oystercatchers..and more! On various occasions I took out the 135 f1.8, one of my favorite shorebird lenses just because it gives such an absolutely dreamy look, and lets you include more of the sky and or scene, and other times I took out the 400 f 4.5 lens. For me, those two lenses were ideal for shooting there, but I know Ray also took out the 28-400 lens as well as his big 400 f2.8 lens. Basically there is no one right lens for anyone or any place and I think it really depends what type of photos you’re trying to achieve and capture on a given outing.
There is one major challenge of photographing at Fort de Soto, their opening hours. Every day they open at 7AM and close at sunset. Many times of the year sunrise is before 7am, so if you are hoping to get in before sunrise, or get those early blue hour and golden hour colors, it might be difficult or impossible to achieve. And when they say they close at sunset, literally 5 minutes after the sun has dipped below the horizon they are kicking people off the beach. It can be really disappointing to be photographing a target species in the most amazing sunset light right before the afterglow of sunset and beautiful dusk colors kick in, and have to walk away from that scene.
Below are many images from the various outings, most numerous being of that beautiful White Morph Reddish Egret! (Click on the image to view full size) And check out the video below the photos to hear Ray and I discuss our trip there!
