Tern in Flight. Monterey Bay, California. July 28, 2014. © Copyright 2014 G Dan Mitchell – all rights reserved.

A tern in flight over Monterey Bay in sunset light

I have had this photograph sitting here waiting to be posted for many weeks now, but somehow it got continually supplanted by other images. Time to get it posted! For one thing, it may be my only photograph of a at this point, and I want to have it in my online archive.

The photograph comes from a memorably evening nearly a year ago when we went to the Moss Landing area of Monterey Bay after hearing that friends had seen whales very close to the shoreline here. Although I have lived in this area for decades and I regularly pass by this area, I had never actually been out to the beach here. The first thing that surprised us when we arrived was the truly astonishing number of sea birds — I had never seen so many in one place before. I surmise that they must have been drawn here by the same fish or other food that drew the whales. With so many birds around I used the conditions to focus on various birds that were extremely close. Here the bird was a tern — not an easy bird to photograph in flight, and they don’t exactly fly in slow, straight lines. I also photographed a big group of pelicans that was settled in very close to the shoreline. And eventually the whales did show up, rising up out of the water a short distance from the beach.

G Dan Mitchell is a California photographer and visual opportunist. Blog | About | Flickr | Twitter | Facebook | Google+ | 500px.com | LinkedIn | Email

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