{"id":393,"date":"2012-05-14T09:35:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-14T17:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/?p=393"},"modified":"2012-05-14T09:35:00","modified_gmt":"2012-05-14T17:35:00","slug":"shorebird-portraits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/2012\/05\/14\/shorebird-portraits\/","title":{"rendered":"Shorebird portraits"},"content":{"rendered":"

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On a dreary Cordova afternoon, during a break from meetings, I strolled out onto the beach and found a pair of Black Oystercatchers, rather joyfully bathing in the water’s edge. The light was gray and dim, with a few spits of rain falling from the sky. Clouds hung low obscuring the still-snowy mountains. The bird’s bills and eyes were the only flash of color in the otherwise black and white landscape, of water, and clouds.<\/p>\n

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If the conditions were black and white in the first image, in this one they were solid gray. And wet. And rainy. I was standing in the damp weather just outside of downtown Cordova where a small creek enters the sound. High tide had pushed a few small flocks of shorebirds up onto the rocky beach and while defending my camera from the steadily falling rain, I snapped a few images of the passing flocks. As the tide rose higher most of the flock disappeared down the coast, and I was left alone on the shore. Until this single, tiny, Least Sandpiper dropped with a chitter onto the beach a few feet in front of mt camera’s lens. So close in fact, I had to back up to allow the 500mm to focus on the sparrow-sized bird. The rain pattered down with increasing intensity and the sandpiper tucked in amongst the rocks. I made photos, until my ride appeared and I slipped away, the Least Sandpiper still hunkered alone by the cold gray water.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a dreary Cordova afternoon, during a break from meetings, I strolled out onto the beach and found a pair of Black Oystercatchers, rather joyfully bathing in the water’s edge. The light was gray and dim, with a few spits… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":395,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/05\/AK-Cordova-6May12-207.jpg?fit=800%2C533&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8wo3z-6l","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=393"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":397,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/393\/revisions\/397"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wildimagephoto.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}