A Mallard hen leads ger her ducklings through the grass at the Fleetwood Park. Happy Mother’s Day !

Shot with a Nikon SB900 flash in TTL mode mounted on camera with a Gary Fong Universal Lightsphere with 1/2 cloud dome diffuser.

A Mallard hen watches three of her ducklings bob for water plants in the pond at the Fleetwood Park.

Shot with a Nikon SB900 flash in TTL mode mounted on camera with a Gary Fong Universal Lightsphere with 1/2 cloud dome diffuser.

A Mallard hen guides her new ducklings uphill from the creek to the pond at the Fleetwood Park. I spotted three hens today all with similarly sized families of ducklings. I went to check on the breeding pair of Mute Swans at Spring Ridge and apparently they did not breed this year. I wonder if the incessant rains had something to do with it.

Shot with a Nikon SB900 flash in TTL mode mounted on camera with a Gary Fong Universal Lightsphere with 1/2 cloud dome diffuser.

Thousands of Snow Geese take off at one time from a farmer’s cornfield at the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Klinefeltersville, PA on Sunday 2-20-2011. The geese typically take off in the morning and head out to the surrounding farm fields in search of plants to eat then they fly back into the safety of the lake area in the afternoon. By mid-March these flights will contain as many as 100,000 birds.

D7000 with Sigma 50-500mm. F7.1 @ 1/1250th ISO 160.

Three Snow Geese fly in formation overhead at the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Klinefeltersville, PA on Sunday 2-20-2011. The Pennsylvania Game Commission web site said on 2-17-2011 that because of temperatures in the mid to upper 60s on two days this week, the ice has begun to thaw on both the lake and the pond and the Snow Geese population was estimated at 55,000 with Canada Geese around 1,800 and Tundra swans near 700. Back at the Chapel Road parking lot I spotted a flock of Snow Geese working the corn field and I’d estimate they were somewhere in the 10,000 range. There are also Hooded Mergansers, about ten males and two females, in the roadside pond by the visitor center. Also in the pond were half a dozen Canada Geese, a handful of Wigeon and several Ring Necked Ducks.

I shot everything today with the D7000 and the Sigma 50-500mm. I still need to work out several of the settings. The biggest conclusion I came up with is the buffer size is definitely smaller than on the D300 and I also need to step up to the Sandisk Extreme Pro 45MB/s write speed SDHC cards. The Sandisk Ultra SDHC cards that I bought when I got the camera only write at at 15MB/s and that’s really hurting the buffer performance on flight shots where I need to record bursts. The other conclusion I made is that when recording video, auto focus tracking is not a realistic option. Manual focus is a must for tracking moving subjects in video. I tried that but when you shoot video, you are shooting in live view mode and not through the view finder’s optical eyepiece and on a sunny day that means you really can’t see the monitor well enough to manually focus the video. So when I came home, I ordered a Zacuto ViewFinder Pro 3X. That should give me much better focusing capabilities for video and supposedly it pops right off for when I want to go back to shooting stills. I guess we’ll see. The other thing I learned is that although I purchased a Rode VideoMic Pro external mono-directional microphone for recording audio for the videos, it doesn’t actually record audio unless you remember to turn it on. Yes, I am in idiot. Live and learn I guess. LOL

For more information on Snow Geese, visit the Cornelll Lab Of Ornithology.

I spent some time today with my Mallard friends at the Fleetwood Park pond. I needed to work on my flight shots with the new D7000 and try and get my settings and timing all working. The Mallards are always willing subjects. I counted 54 of them at the park today but no sign of “Quackers” the lone white domestic duck that has lived at the pond for several years and no sign of my buddy “Stumpy” the Mallard with one foot. I’d like to think they are still with us and maybe just exploring the creek today instead of the pond area. They have a thawed out section of the pond probably 40 feet across and some access to food in the form of patches of grass. With warmer temperatures being called for next week, we should see all the ice and snow melt by the end of February. I don’t know who is looking forward to all that melting more, me or the Ducks.

A Cygnet (baby swan) tries to out swim one of the large ornamental Koi fish in the pond at Spring Ridge Corporate Center. The Koi like to torment the young Swans each year but they don’t ever hurt them. The Cygnet is unsure of the Koi’s intentions at this point though. Better safe than sorry. Photo taken on 5-10-2009.

For more information about Mute Swans, visit this page at the Cornell Lab Of Ornithology.

A Mallard Drake gives me a nice profile opportunity at the Fleetwood Park pond back on 1-24-2009. If you need a good laugh and love animals, check out this video on YouTube.

Canada Goose Gosling at Fleetwood Park back on 5-20-2009. We usually have a few Canada Geese at the park but they are normally transient so when I saw that a mating pair had chosen to raise their Goslings at the park, it was a real treat.

For more information about Canada Geese, visit this page at the Cornell Lab Of Ornithology.

Some of the 120,000-150,000 Snow Geese that visit the Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area in Klinefeltersville, PA during February and March of each year. I shot this back on 3-7-2010. How they don’t all fly into one another is beyond my comprehension.

For more information on Snow Geese, visit the Cornelll Lab Of Ornithology.