bird – Page 3 – The Michael Lam Collection's Blog

The eighth day of our stay in Sint Maarten, we started off with a visit to Fort Amsterdam, its ruins are a bit unusual, a part of it was apparently used as a radio station at one time. The attractions at the fort are things like the cistern or reservoir, long unused, the old buildings or what’s left of them, the canons of course, the views from the different parts of the fort, and while we were there one attraction was wildlife, specifically a young bird who let me get close enough for a few nice photographs.

The fort, although something that would be considered a national heritage site, is located on private land behind a Hotel/Resort, so I had to take at least one photo in the compounds 🙂

We then went off to the beach near Maho where the beach curves around behind the airport, and the aircraft head straight down the sea, over the beach and onto the runway for landing, there was a photograph by Jesse Diamond that my brother had forwarded to me prior to this trip, and both he and Nikhil insisted that I try to take an inspired photograph like it, so that was the main purpose of going there, getting Coronas at more than twice the normal price was just incidental 🙂

Beach Flyover, Princess Julianna Airport, Sint Maarten

Before heading home, we took a stop at a Nature Reserve where they have horseback riding among other activities, got a few photos, but only managed to really like these:

Back home I waited for the evening to arrive so that I could play with the setting sun, seated on the veranda, camera at my side and a cold Heineken to my lips, life is good.

As usual, on this trip, I can’t put all the photos in the blog, so click on the ones here and go straight to the site for all 42 new additions to the Sint Maarten 2010 album.

I seem to live in a location where the “city” meets the “country“, do they call that the suburbs?

One benefit of living here is that I get to see a little bit of both, I have family living in both sections, as it were. On occasion, when I am leaving home for work, I would see some birds, usually too far off for me to photograph, but sometimes, they’ll be perched on a nearby fence, or post, or wire (you get the drift) and if I carefully lift my camera I may even get to photograph them without scaring them away first.

Sitting in the Rain — On Graham Hall Road, Cummingslodge, Georgetown.

My favourites are the various hawks that prey on snails from the gutters and trenches in the area, anyone who has seen my photographs would have seen these quite a few times over the years 🙂 I probably need to try and capture those in new ways, even I am getting tired of just seeing them staring at me 🙂 Quite common, in our area are some types of white birds… OK, I just noticed that I know nothing of bird nomenclature, if anyone knows where Waldyke Prince is, tell him I need help in this area. Anyway, back to what I was saying… there are these white birds, and once in a while they’ll pose just like the hawks.

I have also found that I don’t take enough photos in the rain, this may have to do with the fact that my camera is now weather-sealed, but still, I don’t do it enough. My favourite rain shot is still my Fleur de Lis Gate Toppers, which I did twice, once when I used a Canon Powershot S5 and then recently with the Canon Rebel T1i, anyway, enough advertising for Canon, here is that white bird sitting in the rain 🙂

Of course, if anyone knows the name, common and scientific, I would be grateful for the knowledge.