Saint Andrews Beach

I spent about 3 hours at the south end of Jekyll Island shooting the birds and the sunset. It was a glorious night, cool and comfortable, light breezes. I set up my tripod in the sand and took pictured of the birds first, as there was still reasonable but not perfect light.

Hundreds of scooters, terns, sandpipers, gulls and pelicans congregate at the south end rest and to spend the night. The terns and gulls put forth a cacophony of voices which rose and fell as I moved around. They seemed to be more or less collected by type, with the smaller birds like the sandpipers at the edges, and the larger terns and gulls in the middle. Like airplanes on an aircraft carrier, the terns lined up facing into the wind, while the sandpipers danced around looking for bugs in the sand, hopping in and out of the waves.

It would have been nice to have another couple hundred millimeters in my lens, but I had to make do with what I had, my 70-300 mm zoom lens. Autofocus kept trying to focus on the waves in the background, so I had to turn it off.

Later, as the sun started to dash into the treeline on the marsh across the bay, I switched to my 18-135 zoom to get a wider angle. The rusting shipreck buried in the sand provided a nice foreground for my composition, and occasionally a bird or three would wander into the frame. In the middle, a school of 4 or 5 dolphins gorged themselves on the abundant fish that mush have been schooling near the beach, and a dozen pelicans dive bombed their supper, too.

It seemed like forever for the sun to set, and I kept recomposing and shooting pictures, taking over 300 in all. What you see here are a few of the nicer ones.