Kayaking on the lagoon was my favorite activity and my favorite means of photographing birds and other creatures during my visit to Costa Rica. The kayak enabled me to be at eye level with the birds and the birds allowed us to dock our kayaks in the floating vegetation that attracted them, mere feet away. The jacanas were everywhere and were delightful to watch. They have very long toes that enable them to navigate safely across the floating rafts of vegetation while they look for food in the water and on the vegetation. They would often leap into the air, wings aloft, then settle down again. Sometimes they’d fly from raft to raft. Moose was constantly after us to watch for “gesture” when we photographed any birds and to avoid placing our subjects dead center. Neither admonition was easy to follow. In reviewing my photos from the lagoon, and in particular, those of the jacanas, I was surprised to see that quite a few had a gesture that made the shot more interesting and not all were dead center. I have to confess, however, that I did crop a few shots to 8X10 and moved the subject out of dead center. Jacanas are about 9 inches tall. The males and females look alike. The juveniles are light colored.
These are fantastic! I love the idea of doing water bird photography from a kayak. I see what you mean about the gesture- great advice from Moose!
Carol You have some really fun shots – I would love to have seen Moose in a kayak, even more fund must have been Richard. What great guys! You will see Purple Gallinules when you come to Texas – very similar birds. However I will not be offering you a kayak for those days – we don’t have little bitty Crocs here, we have BIG GATORS who are looking for the gallinules too. But They wouldn’t mind taking a chomp on a sweet California lady. See you soon