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Great Blue Heron
Ardea herodias
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Taken in the fog - with my flash at +3!
The birds are slowly starting to come back to the San Francisco Bay Area. It's been a long, slow late summer...so I've been reading while we're in the bird drought.
I can't recommend enough The Wisdom of Birds: A History of Ornithology by Tim Birkhead. Fabulously well written. Don't let the Amazon reviews scare you - the book is not as technical as the reviewers would lead you to believe. You'll learn a lot about science and what it means to "DO" science. One of my favorite paragraphs quotes Bill Thorpe and the triumph of reason (i.e. field observation and experiment) over belief (i.e. philosophical and religious tracts such as Aristotle, etc.).
None but a sportsman [i.e. a hunter] can full appreciate the intelligence of animals. To know them thoroughly, you must have associated with them; and most philosophers fail in this point...Sportsmen, who observe because they have every opportunity, have rarely the time or the capacity to draw inferences, and philosphers, who reason without end, have rarely the opportunity of observing.
I wish more Americans were birders. You can't be a fascinated birder without understanding science. Sometimes the lack of science understanding in America really boggles my mind.
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Focal length: 500 mm
fStop: 5.6
ISO: 800
Shutter Speed: 1/800 sec.
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Mountain View, CA - Shoreline
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Oct 18, 2009
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