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.

Wildlife on the Island

I've been spending a few minutes every few days to see if I can capture some of the wildlife on Jekyll with my camera. This has been marginally successful. Squirrels abound here in the campground, and you'd think that they would be an easy mark. But they seem to be somewhat camera shy, and my longest lens (450 mm) is just barely long enough. Plus, then tend to hang around int eh shadows and move a lot, making exposure difficult. I got a lot of pictures of squirrel tails leaving the scene. And they absolutely refuse to smile. But I managed to get this one.

Seagulls abound on the island, too, but not in the campground. I caught these two sea rats waiting in a parking lot for a handout. I'm not sure why a seagull would prefer soaking his webbed feet in a puddle, rather than dry grounds, and he's not talking. Unfortunately, for me, seagulls have their pictures taken way too often, so unless I capture one with a fishing pole, or using a laptop, it will be a fairly ordinary picture. Still, it's practice.



Raccoons are also plentiful here, not as plentiful as squirrels or seagulls, but they are regular daily visitors. This one didn't realize that Thumper was lurking under our motorhome and got a little too close. When he was alarmed by the barking and snarling teeth chasing him into the road (cut short by Thumper's leash reaching it's full extension) he scrambled up a tree. Six feet up a tree seemed pretty safe, until I showed up with my camera and blinding light to further confound a quiet night of carousing in the campground. Funny, the more pictures I took, the farther up the tree he scrambled.

There's a lot of cardinals in the campground. There's a "bird sanctuary", a portion of the campground where feeders have been hung for the birds. They tend to be skittish, and the mirror flop on my camera tends to keep them alert. But if I stay far enough away, I can get a few images of them hopping on the ground.

There's other wildlife here besides us. I'll keep trying to sneak up on them and get a few snapshots.