Wild Delmarva

It is a great morning for photography when everything lines up just right. I found these two Great Blue Heron chicks watching the sunrise from their Delmarva Peninsula rookery nest. When the gull passed by in just the right spot I had my photograph.

With some 46 million turkeys being served for the holiday these Wild Turkeys probably won’t be on the menu as they are from Delaware where the turkey hunting season is in the spring. Delmarva’s turkey population was wiped out by the mid-1800s. In the 1980s Wild Turkeys were reintroduced in Delaware and are thriving with the population estimated at 4,000 birds.

People ask me all the time what is my favorite photograph. From Wild Delmarva it would have to be this Great Blue Heron that caught and ate a young Clapper Rail. Nature can be brutal and difficult to watch but as a photographer moments like this are incredible to capture.

It wasn’t a good day for this male Northern Pintail last winter when the female took a bite out of him. But, for me as a photographer, catching this moment in great light was a good day indeed. They were fighting over a tiny bit of unfrozen water (see below).

These male and female Northern Pintails were about to break into a fight over a small patch of open water where they could feed. Several days of cold temperatures had frozen the salt marsh and open water was at a premium.

With cool mornings now it might be good to look back to one very cold morning, the day I started photographing Wild Delmarva almost two years ago. This is the Mispillion River and the temperature was just 7 degrees F. The river froze when the tide came in and when the tide went out the ice settled down on the muddy river bottom.

Wild Delmarva is here now and shipping autographed, first edition copies begins this week.