Black Skimmer Landing

In keeping with the bird theme that seems to be very popular this week on our blogs due to a couple meetups that included bird shooting, here's just one more.

Just before sunset every night, the Black Skimmers, Laughing Gulls and Terns gather on the beaches to roost. This one, a Black Skimmer is just coming in. It's a pretty amazing sight to see them all lined up--usually facing the same direction roosting on the beaches.

As a bonus, I'm attaching a second image showing more of the flock. There are probably 100 or more birds on this beach just like this.

I've seen them flying at night picking up food on my canal in my back yard. It's amazing to watch how they get their food. If you look closely, you'll notice that their lower beak is quite a bit longer than the upper beak. That's so they can fly (really fast) with their lower beak in the water scooping up food to eat. They have very long wings for their body size. I'll see if I can find a photo where I've caught them swimming for a post later on.

Settings used for these photos are as follows. The shooting mode is in continuous in case one of them or many of them take off, ISO is 200 because although it is nearing sunset, it's still quite bright. The exposure is 1/250 at 7.1, in aperture priority at 250mm with my 55-250mm lens. I used partial metering off the beach so as to not blow out the whites. The shadows were lightened slightly using Lightroom.