The Gathering Place

I don't think I have ever seen so many different types of birds at one time as there were in this inland water area.  It may be called a tidepool, but I am not sure if we have those around here.  Some of the birds I can identify as white pelicans, gulls, skimmers, cormorants, and egrets with confidence. And then some that I am not sure of, and may be sanderlings or longbilled curlews or marbled godwits (don't you just love some of those names!) and at least one black necked stilt and a few killdeer.  Mostly the same kind of birds hung out together in groups in different areas, like a bunch of cliques in highschool. I did not have my teleconverter and I was there in the middle of the afternoon so these are not fantastic nature images, but I wanted to show a little of what the scene was like. I tried some shallow depth of field shots, some panning (which I am pretty bad at), some shots with more depth of field. In the bottom image you can see a smoke line in the sky from what we think were grass fires on Bolivar Penninsula.