Six images of four Little Pied Cormorants: one balancing, one peering, one old favourite and a young one with oddly cute iron staining on both its black and white feathers.
Little Pied Cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos)
This Little Pied Cormorant inspired this week’s post. These birds are described as black above and white below, but they are often seen with varying amounts of reddish/orange iron staining. I particularly like the golden highlights in its black head feathers.
This is a young bird; older Little Pied Cormorants are white above their eyes, as in three of the images below.
Little Pied Cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos)
The colours on this bird delight me; it’s definitely not just black and white.
Little Pied Cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos)
The cormorant above is an adult, nicely showing off its tail which is relatively longer than the tails of other cormorants.
Little Pied Cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos)
The balancing cormorant, above, shows off many of the Little Pied Cormorant’s fine features as well as a play of colours on its ‘black’ feathers. Their feet are large which makes them clumsier on land than they are under water.
Little Pied Cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos)
Here’s the first cormorant again, I’m working on my laptop and it’s too fiddly to change the order, sorry about that. It’s also the reason that I’m unable to share camera settings for these images.
I got to meet this beautiful bird because of a lovely group of wildlife photographers that visited my exhibition before Christmas. We kept in touch and a few days ago I was lucky enough to spend time with them at the farm of one of the photographers; it was blissful.
Little Pied Cormorant (Microcarbo melanoleucos)
The image above is one of my first bird images, one that I like! Many of them (that I was thrilled with at the time) I would now happily delete.
Happy birding
Kim
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Beautiful exposure on these shots, Kim. Very hard to keep the detail in the whites and the blacks of our pied feathered friends. Great work!
Thank you Neil. I think about the black/white exposure issues quite a bit and feel especially sorry for wedding photographers – I’d much rather photograph birds, even though they never offer to pay.
Wonderful photography Kim. Love getting your photos.
That’s lovely Joyce, it’s good to know you enjoy the photographs, thank you
The bird may be little, the perfection? Huge. Infinite even.
Thank you.
I think they are delightful too, they always seem to have interesting expressions.
Aw the baby is so sweet! I love the little feather stuck to its bill. There is beautiful clarity in these photos that show off all the birds various colours!
They can be surprisingly colourful for ‘black and white’ birds that’s for sure. I especially like these cormorants for some strange reason and I like that little feather too.