Recovery Discovery

I recently had food poisoning. Ugh! What a miserable experience. Thankfully it passed relatively quickly but it’s left me a bit uninterested in food. That means I don’t have a lot of energy. What to do when you don’t have a lot of energy? For me, that means I’m looking back at photos with the goal of deleting hundreds of “meh” or failed photos. Fortunately I came across I photo I don’t remember taking and saved it from a mass purge.

This is a photo of a Hawaiian black-necked stilt, the endangered subspecies of the more common black-necked stilts found in Texas and Central/South America. This photo was taken at the Kealia Pond National Wildlife Refuge on Maui. I’m rather in love with this photo because of the bird’s posture, with its head plunged into the shallows. Black-necked stilts eat small fish and aquatic invertebrates so they sometimes need to go head-first after their prey.

I’m so glad I took this photo because it reveals the bird in action, living its life. It’s not a portrait - Do you want to see one? I have plenty - but it’s a clue to its survival. I’m becoming more aware that I need to remember to take photos that show more of how animals navigate the world. That’s a key element to conservation story-telling.

Spring Wildflowers