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TITLE: Bittern face-on
INFO: "A few frames on from the previous image and the Bittern continues to 'perform' well. This head-on/face-on shot shows the slightly odd positioning of the Bittern's eyes, kind of downward-looking rather than forward-looking, which gives the bird a seemingly imperious expression viewed this way. In order to actually look forward, the bird has to point its beak more vertically, in the so-called 'bitterning' posture. The eye positioning like this may be partly an adaptation to its behaviour of 'bitterning' whereby the bird stretches itself up tall and thin in order to blend in better with the reeds of its chosen habitat but still needs to be able to retain binocular vision to look around, and maybe also partly due to its main method of fishing, where it places its beak just into the water, watching for its fish prey close in and turning its head slightly side to side presumably to spot its quarry prior to grabbing it. This image isn't quite what I was looking for, the beak of the bird needs to be up higher - in the 'bitterning' posture - so that the eyes are pointing more forward, and I've had to crop in a lot for this web image composition, but it's the nearest I've got to that image so far." February 2012 (Ivy North Hide) TECH: Nikon D700, Nikkor 200-400mm f4 zoom lens at 340mm, ISO 1600, f5.6, 1/750 sec. Lens rested on hide window shelf. Cropped image about 10% of frame (from full-frame FX-format image). |
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