Texas Bird Photography: Laguna Seca Ranch: Part 2 Rio Grande Valley

Check out this. I'm following Randall out to the blinds at Laguna Sica Ranch. He's gonna have me sit up in the blinds, see what happens. I've spent a ton of time in blinds in the past, but this will be a new experience in Texas with raptor feeders even. So crazy, huh? My breakfast in the blind. I have no idea what machacado is. It's good. The beauty of this blind at Laguna Sica is that raptors are usually so spooky and it's so rare to get eye-level shots of them, and that's where this ranch excels. I mean, eye-level shots of Caracara and Harris's hawk. Awesome. One of the first birds to show up was the gorgidius Harris's hawk, formerly called the bay-winged hawk for obvious reasons, but these are amazing animals only found in the U.S., in southern Texas, a little bit in New Mexico, and very southern Arizona. They are very social birds, breeding in groups up to seven individuals, and they hunt together. They hunt as a pack almost. One will pursue prey, and if that one misses the target, the next one will kind of swoop in and try and get it. They've been also known to surround prey, you know, perched above hiding prey, and then one will go down on the ground and walk around on the ground to flush the prey so the others can grab it. Very cool bird. His crop is so full, that Caracara. Yeah, they do. The crested Caracara is another south Texas specialty. There are populations in southern Arizona and an isolated population in Florida, but they are in the falcona today, but they're not a true falcon, but they're closely related, and their diet is just incredibly diverse. Of course, they eat carrion like vultures, but they'll also eat snakes and mammals and birds and even fruits. It is believed that this is the bird on the national emblem of Mexico. Just got out of the raptor blinds here at Laguna Sica. Crazy numbers of crested Caracaras. Black vulture, that was kind of a neat one. Turkey vultures, and of course Harris's hawks, one of the most beautiful hawks in the world. Had a flyover white tail and red tail. I was hoping that white-tailed hawk would come in. That's one of my target birds. I was kind of spazzy. I'm like, I don't know which way to shoot. Birds coming here and there, and the Harris's hawks were fighting with the Caracaras, and I missed most of that. But here are my favorite still photos from the time in the raptor blind. Now we're going to go over to the songbird blinds. That's part two of today from Laguna Sica. All right, stay tuned. Bulldog pond. I'm going to shoot some ground-level, ground-level birds, songbirds here. We are now set up in the bulldog blind. Starting a little drip. They've got a hose up in the tree that's dripping, and that, even that just little sound of dripping, attracts the birds. There's a male, nice male. We're waiting for some birds to come in, so I may have to, oh, I hear green jays right now. Green jay imitating a hawk. The green jays are really the star of the show, but I'm hoping for a roadrunner or some bobwhite. But yeah, this is my, one of my many happy places I could sit in blinds forever, because you just never know what's going to show up. So we're at bulldog pond, one of the morning songbird blinds, and I'm with Randall Patterson, my guide. But we spent an awesome morning in the raptor blind, but Laguna Sica, tell us a little about it, Randall. Sure, you're looking at, we have over 700 acres of deep south Texas brushland, privately owned, so you have, you just have the ranch to yourself when you shoot with us here. And as Sparky mentioned, we had a great raptor shoot this morning, and it wrapped up a little early, so we're gonna, we slipped over here to the tail end of the morning shoot for the songbirds. We already had some good green jays come up, and we're hoping we'll get the paralexia, and maybe some quail. We had some turkeys visit us on the way in. This evening, Laguna Sica has four songbird blinds, two for morning light, and two for evening light. And this evening we'll be in the beaver pond, which is a real popular one, where we have another water feature in front of the blind, as well as a reflection pond built, and a natural pond that's to the side, where you can see deer and different wildlife drinking. It's really a good pond, that's where we get, we get the most diversity at that one. It's been going pretty well here at Bulldog Pond. Had a javelina, collared peccary come in, but he must have saw my camera move, and he headed out. But cardinals bathing, and paralexias, the yellow-rumped warbler, phoebe, green jays, long-billed thrasher, that was kind of a cool one. They hate being out in the open. Yeah, so this is, you just never know what's going to show up at these pools, especially here in the scrub land of Texas, where water is at a premium. Of course, the light was a little harsh at this time of day, but I got a few keepers. It was now time to move over to the quote-unquote beaver pond for our late afternoon shoot. Just because of the harsh midday light, and then now this afternoon, trying to fill in some shadows. I put on my Flashpoint flash, a gift from my kids for Father's Day, pretty cool, and my MagMod flash extender with the Fresnel lens on the front to just extend that flash out 20, 30, 40 feet. Yeah, just helps fill in the shadows. Midday, when it's really hot light, you know, you can soften up the light a bit by filling in those shadows, and the birds could care less. Shooting on a ranch is something you don't want to do on your own. Alan Murphy Workshops goes there, and he is probably the premier bird portrait photographer in America, and his setups and attention to detail and also birds in flight is second to none. So check out Alan Murphy's website. My friend Amy works for him now. She used to be one of our naturalists in the Sac Zimbabwe. I felt bad for this grasshopper until it solved its problem itself. Check out this green jay ticked off at this long-billed thrasher. Look what he does, just yanks on his tail. Pretty funny. We did luck out and get a little covey of bobwhite coming in. That was pretty neat. And here's my favorite photos from the evening at Beaver Pond. Yeah, I mean, the whole ranch experience, you know, you can get some really awesome bird-on-a-stick quote-unquote photos, and I knew this going in, but I wanted better portraits of these species I just didn't have good photos of. But the backgrounds, the perches are all really beautiful, but if you don't go in the depth of winter and go maybe more in the spring when there's lots of wildflowers blooming, your guide can set those up so they're in the frame. You get little blobs of color, flowers on the perches, things like that. Back to the photos now. Yeah, after taking so many cardinal photos, I decided to get a little creative. Creative with the cropping in this case, and I like this photo, but I thought, what if I spin it around and, yeah, really make it a crazy pattern. Fill flash really helped on this cardinal portrait since the bird was in shadows and yet there was this beautiful golden backlight. I used fill flash with the MagMod flash extender on a really made the subjects pop against that gorgeous evening light background. As I mentioned in the previous Texas video, I'm trying to photograph 600 species of birds in North America, north of Mexico. The only one I got new in this episode was the beewix wren, but I did improve on a bunch of species as you can see here. The setups and the pools and the food attracted a cool variety of birds.