Still from Time Lapse of Feeding Frenzy of Egrets, Herons, Spoonbills, Storks, and Ibis. Orlando Wetlands Park, Christmas.

Earlier this week I visited Orlando Wetlands Park, east of Orlando.  This is one of my favorite local wetlands and always enjoy visiting it.  This was my first visit this year as they just reopened to the public after being closed for duck hunting season.  Upon arrival, I found it to be a very foggy morning and hoped it would creating some cool moody lighting.  In the very first cell, I found an incredible feeding frenzy of wading birds including several species of egrets and herons as well as lots of Roseate Spoonbills, Wood Storks, and both Glossy and White Ibises.  I shot a lot of video but wanted to share this still that was pulled from a time lapse I did of the entire feeding frenzy.  Stay tuned next week to see the whole video on the next Nature Profiles!

Hundreds of Sandhill Cranes join a small flock of White Pelicans and thousands of ducks to roost in the Click Ponds at Viera Wetlands.  (click on the image to view larger)

Last week while I was shooting the Great Blue Heron Courtship film, I spent an evening at the Click Ponds, just adjacent to Viera Wetlands at sunset.  Each evening, several hundred Sandhill Cranes (Grus canadensis) are coming in to roost in the ponds and it is a pretty spectacular show.  A few days earlier, I had spent some time photographing and filming from the west side of the pond with the light at my back and gotten a few decent images but nothing spectacular.  To try for something different, I decided to shoot on the east side of the pond, shooting back into the setting sun.

By the time I made it to the ponds, the sun had already set but the sky was ablaze.  It was a chaotic scene with a large flock of White Pelicans, close to a thousand or more ducks, and a growing flock of cranes.  To tell the story, I really wanted to isolate a few of the cranes in flight as they came into the pond at dusk.  After taking a bunch of images, I finally found a group of birds that walked away from the dense flock just as a couple more cranes entered my frame.  So far, this one of my favorite experiences and photographs from the project.

To learn more about the evolution of this image, watch this week’s episode of Behind the Lens, “The Evolution of a Photography.”

A winter sunset over the Gulf of Mexico on the beach of Little Gasparilla Island

It has been less than a week since Filming Florida officially launched and so far so great!  Over the past few months, I  spent a lot of time thinking about where and how I was going to start Filming Florida.  Ultimately, I decided to start where it all began for me, on the west coast of Florida on a small barrier island called Little Gasparilla Island.  My family has been fortunate to co-own a beach house with a few other families on this small barrier island, only accessible by boat.  I can’t remember my first visit here as I was only 10 months old, but countless trips over the last 30 years has really shaped my passion for exploration and learning about the natural world.

I grew up here fishing with my dad and had an amazing amount of freedom to explore on my own, even from a very young age.  I think I was probably only eight or so when I was constantly wading around the dock with a net catching small fish, shrimp, crabs, and the occasional seahorse.  It was just a few years after that when I was driving around in a small skiff fishing and exploring by myself.  This really is the place where I fell in love with natural Florida and I can’t think of a better place to start the journey of Filming Florida.