Nature Photo Challenge – Long-legged birds

This week’s challenge really suits me because I have many photos of long-legged birds! Mostly great blue herons and egrets that I see around my neighborhood when I take my nearly daily walks. I also managed to catch a great blue heron in flight and two egrets in flight and am including those videos below. Note that the great blue heron flies right past a stationary egret as it lands.

If you’d like to join the challenge, or to view other entries, check out Denzil’s post for more details.

Up first is an egret that I managed to catch in flight as well as its reflection.

The next photo is a HUGE great blue heron I saw at my local park. I don’t believe I had ever seen one this large before.

Next is a gallery of great blue herons. You will notice green muck in every photo in this gallery and some in the next gallery. I believe it’s the run-off of chemicals from lawns around this lake at my local park. I read about another lake nearby that cleaned up their muck last year. I keep hoping our town will clean up the muck on our lake but, so far, no luck on the muck cleaning.

A gallery of the “white bird” follows. We love the white bird in our house. So much so that whenever we see an egret one of us calls out “white bird!”. It’s sort of like a good luck thing, and seeing them always brightens my day. They are so beautiful and they spend spring through fall around here. I almost always see one on my walks.

This one deserves to be on its own as it’s one of my favorites of the white bird! He didn’t fly away as I approached which was really nice. Thank you white bird!

And one of a green heron who doesn’t really have long legs but I thought I’d include it anyway. I had never heard of this bird before and a fellow walker at the park saw me photographing a bird and volunteered to show me a green heron. And now I see these all the time.

To close I wanted to share two videos. Okay, these are not photos but seeing these majestic birds in flight is so fun! First is the great blue heron in flight that I mentioned above. The second video is of two egrets in flight. You will notice one egret is in a tree, as the two keep flying but I’m only focusing on one at that point. You see the second one that was also in flight just finish landing as the other one flies out of sight to the right. I count three egrets, wow.