Royal Tern, Litchfield Spit South Carolina

We enjoyed a wonderful trip to Litchfield by the Sea, South Carolina the week before last.  It's our one week the boys look forward to year round. It's really our last hurrah for the summer.  Preschool starts up next week for both boys, and so does Megan's semester.  It'll be fall before I know it!

-Tom

Piping Plover - Litchfield Beach - South Carolina

This past August during our vacation to coastal South Carolina, I awoke early one morning to walk the mile and a half or so to an inlet where a great amount of birds hang out.  I didn't come back with great pictures for my effort that morning, but as I was reviewing my work last week, I stumbled across this banded shorebird.  It was mixed in with a bunch of other things, including many semi-palmated plovers, but this bird looked different.

I'm not up on piping plovers all that much, but I do know they are listed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under the endangered species act.  It turns out that there are two listings for the species- The birds that nest along the Great lakes are listed as endangered, while the rest of the birds, including the prairie nesting birds of the northern great plains and those that next along the Atlantic shore are threatened.

Now, if you look at the bird above, it's a bit of a crap shoot trying to discern what exactly the colors are on the left leg.  Purple?  Blue?  Orange?  Red?  The green on the right leg is a little easier.  Being fairly uncertain that this even was a piping plover, I sent the above image to researchers at the University of Minnesota.

Sure enough, I received an e-mail back from Alice Van Zoeren, and after a few exchanges, she did confirm that this bird was a piping plover from the Great Lakes Population.  By identifying the color band combinations, she was able to tell me that this bird, a female, was hatched at North Manitou Island in Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore in 2012 and returned and returned to breed in Leelanau State Park in 2013, a site which had not seen breeding activity for Piping Plovers in 10 years.

It's always a good idea to pore over all your bird photographs, even those that normally wouldn't be a keeper, to check for bands.  You never know what you might find.  And now, three months later, I can add another bird to my life list.  Plus, I've added just one more bit of information to help the researchers understand more about the Great Lakes populations of this tiny little bird.

-Tom

Want to take a look at the whole uncropped image?  How many species do you see?  Which ones?

Litchfield Beach Timelapse Video

While I can't say I've become obsessed with making videos, I have made an effort to use my camera to its fullest- and that means capturing time lapse and HD videos with my limited time.  I seem to find that vacations are now my time where I try new photo things- and our trip to Litchfield Beach this August was a perfect place to try time lapse.

Video has a big learning curve.  When I exported this video from Photoshop CS4, it rendered at 6 gigabytes.  Needless to say I received a message from YouTube with a link offering help how to better export my videos for the website.

When I set up my camera, I was expecting these billowing cumulus clouds to continue their upward development, when in fact, the opposite happened.  Although I didn't get what I had visualized, I really like this video- I had to watch it several times before I saw the man cleaning the pool.

-Tom

Litchfield Beach South Carolina- A Family Vacation

Thanks for watching! :)

-Tom

Across the Midway Inlet to Litchfield Beach

I find it fairly amazing how many of the Atlantic barrier islands are lined with homes.  Yes, it's a fantastic place to spend a week, year, or a lifetime, but these places are dynamic. Sand moves.  I can't complain though- We did rent a barrier island home for a week.  Yes, the cottage was probably 80-100 years old and had survived many hurricanes over the years, but that's just a wink in the history of our world.

Our weekend was busy and kid-filled!  My DSLR didn't even come out of the bag- but I'll have more images of Ohio's progression towards the peak of fall this week.

-Tom

Sunset over the Salt Marsh, Pawleys Island

Have a great week. Here is a view across the salt marsh towards the north causeway at Pawleys Island, South Carolina.

The Fantasy Land of Seabrook Island

The island that Megan, my Mom, my brother, and myself traveled to this weekend for my cousin's wedding really was a fantasy land. A gated, private island, catering to those with more resources than ourselves! Wow, what huge houses there are on this island, built right into the dunes and and around the swales of what once was a pristine, natural area. It is still fairly intact, and the beach there is the only place along the South Carolina shore where sand is actually accumulating. These are images from our walk along the shore Saturday evening. Storms were threatening, so I left the big gun at home (my XTI and bag) and shot these images with Megan's Kodak p850, a very serviceable 5 megapixel super zoom. Take a close look at each photo. There is a life bird for me in one of them, see if you can spot it.