With everyone on Facebook posting their great photos of our Thanksgiving Snipe, I thought I would go ahead and process and share before they got lost and forgotten for months. The photo above is, in my opinion, the most pleasing way of capturing a shore bird. The back of most shore birds are often their most colorful and patterned side. I like to try and capture the from behind with their head turned so to see their eye and the length/shape of their bill.
I did not bring a wider lens on this morning, but I wish that I had. I counted 17 Snipe within a pretty close distance of each other in a section of sweet and soft mud.
In the image above one can imagine the depth they can get with those lance-like bills as they probe the mud for invertebrates. Check out the video below to get an idea of how these guys feed.
-OZB
A Thousand Acres of Silphiums 