A Visit to the Alligator Farm

St. Augustine Alligator Farm is a fun place to visit with a short trip than offers old Spanish forts and nice water scenes. For photographers this is an easy and fun visit that yields water reflections, beaches, boats, birds, and the Sea Lion Bridge. Sunsets can be vivid and the range of possibilities makes it a fun trip.

My favorite place is the bird rookery there in the Alligator Farm. It seems that the birds populate the rookery in a rotating scenario that will have different kinds of birds in their nesting season depending on the time of the year. The Alligator Farm website usually will tell what kind of bird is most prominent at any given time. I went for the Florida Birding Festival in April and there were mostly Snowy Egret and Roseate Spoonbill there. They were perched in their nests with several eggs waiting for them to hatch. Many others had already hatched and it was a sight to watch the parents as they fed the young. It was pretty much constant activity. The most exciting part of this nesting season is the outrageous color that is put on by the feathers of the mating birds. My cover picture on this post will be of a Tricolor Heron that has adapted a saturated blue hue with some lighter streaks in his head feathers. In this image he is calling for a females attention while strutting around high in a tree over the alligator lagoon. It is a tough part of nature but many of the young birds will fall out of the nest to his doom in the lagoon!

I have posted several more images of these large colorful birds on my website at http://carneypictures.com/. Please take a look and enjoy the birds and even look around at some of the other subjects that may hold interest for you. My last big trip this past October was to The Grand Teton National Park in Jackson Hole Wyoming. I photographed many different kinds of animals while there! Moose, bison or buffalo, deer, elk, and the most beautiful mountains imaginable!