Green heron on the hunt

By August 17th, two months without rain had caused large parts of Bull Creek to dry up. When I checked a stretch along the Smith Memorial Trail that morning I found that a remaining pool had become the hunting ground of a green heron, Butorides virescens. Time after time I watched as the heron crouched, stepped slowly forward as it kept its eyes fixed on something in the water that it could see but I couldn’t, till suddenly the heron lunged to snatch a small fish from the water.

On the technical side, most of the second photograph shows motion blur because I panned to keep up with the heron as it walked fairly quickly to the left. On the good side, panning let me keep the upper part of the bird, including its bill and the fish in it, sharp. Alternatively, to reduce motion blur I could’ve set a higher sensitivity and a faster shutter speed than the 1/400 I used, but I was already at ISO 1600, and with the shallower depth of field that would have resulted from a faster shutter speed I might not have been able to keep the fish and all the important parts of the heron simultaneously in focus. Tradeoffs.

 

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“I know not why a man should not have liberty to print whatever he would speak; and to be answerable for the one, just as he is for the other, if he transgresses the law in either. But gagging a man, for fear he should talk heresy or sedition, has no other ground than such as will make gyves [shackles] necessary, for fear a man should use violence if his hands were free, and must at last end in the imprisonment of all who you will suspect may be guilty of treason or misdemeanor.”

So wrote John Locke about the Licensing Act, which had enforced pre-publication censorship and banned “heretical, seditious, schismatical, or offensive books” in Great Britain until Parliament let the act lapse in 1695. I was led to that quotation by reading Jacob Mchangama’s new book Free Speech: a History from Socrates to Social Media. I encourage you to read it, too, and learn about some of the great many times throughout history that political regimes and supporters of ideologies and religions have suppressed the speech and writing of people who disagree with them. That’s especially important now, when many activists and institutions have been assailing freedom of expression more vehemently than at any time in my adult life.

Check out Jacob Mchangama’s website, where you can listen to or read edited transcriptions of episodes from his podcast about free speech, Clear and Present Danger.

You’re also welcome to read the essay about John Locke that my father, another Jacob, included in his 1949 book Rebels of Individualism.

  

© Steven Schwartzman 2022

 

 

 

Yet another change of pace

Outside Corpus Christi’s Art Museum of South Texas on June 3rd as we were walking back to our car I noticed a great blue heron (Ardea herodias) standing on a piling in the bay right at the edge of the parking lot. Hurriedly going to my camera bag and putting on my telephoto lens, I made a bunch of portraits. A man fishing near by noticed what I was doing and volunteered to throw a fish onto the ground near where the heron was. I said sure: he threw his fish, the heron fluttered onto the ground and snatched it up, and I kept taking pictures till the fish disappeared down the bird’s long throat.

  

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Here’s some good news. In Chicago on June 6th, 20-year-old Anthony Perry had just arrived at his train station when he noticed a nearly unconscious man on the electrified third rail. Anthony jumped down on the track bed, nimbly worked his way into a good position, and pulled the injured man away.

“‘I was hoping I could just grab him and not feel nothing, but I felt a little shock,’ Perry said. ‘I felt it all through my body actually. I didn’t let that stop me.’ With the help of another commuter, Perry administered CPR, saving the man’s life.”

You’re welcome to read more about this heroic act and watch a 7-minute video about it.

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

Kayangan Lake

On December 13 we went on one of what are known as Coron’s island-hopping tours. The first stop was Kayangan Lake, which was so crowded with tourists that I could hardly take any photographs. At a moment when swimmers and floaters briefly cleared a spot on the opposite side of the lake, I managed to get the picture above. (How about the color of the water?) Other than that, I was limited to a few closeups of things in the lake, like these rippled rocks that appeared to be covered with neon lights:

A floating red leaf caught my attention, as did the needlefish near it:

Here’s a closer look at the needlefish:

© 2020 Steven Schwartzman

Fish fry

As I stood on June 2nd in the shallow water photographing the algae you saw last time on the flooded land adjacent to Naruna Way on the Blackland Prairie in far northeast Austin, a school of tiny fish darted about, sometimes sheltering under the algae and sometimes coming out into the clear, where their rapid movements when startled by my own movements caused the surface of the water to ripple and the sun’s incident light on that clear morning to create shimmering and quickly changing patterns that perhaps not coincidentally made it harder to distinguish individual fry intermingled within them. (How’s that for a single sentence of slightly over a hundred words?)

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

New Zealand: Southern black-backed gull

On February 20th along the Wellington foreshore we noticed that a bird (which turned out to be an immature southern black-backed gull, Larus dominicanus) had found a fish (which turned out to be a spotted stargazer, Genyagnus monopterygius). At first glance the fish seemed dead, but as the gull kept pecking and pulling at it, the fish occasionally wriggled and proved that it was still alive, even if its stargazing nights were clearly over. To say that surviving in a state of nature isn’t always fun is an understatement.

Thanks to Dr. Colin Miskelly, Curator for Terrestrial Vertebrates at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, for confirming that the bird is an immature southern black-backed gull and for identifying the spotted stargazer. Dr. Miskelly hosts a blog dealing with New Zealand’s animals, and by coincidence a recent post showed a southern black-backed gull egg and chick.

© 2015 Steven Schwartzman

Red-eared slider and entourage

I’d photographed a red-eared slider (Trachemys scripta elegans) several times before, but never with as attentive an entourage as I found at the Riata Trace Pond on July 30th. Everywhere the turtle went, the fry were quick to follow. What they got out of that I don’t know, but what I got out of it was a different sort of picture from my previous ones of red-eared sliders.

I took this photograph about 11 minutes before the one of the bearded robber fly you recently saw.

© 2014 Steven Schwartzman