The best part about visiting the beach is the chance to work with shorebirds – at least, it is for me. I am an equal opportunity wildlife photographer; I’ll photography virtually any critter that appears and holds still long enough. So on the beach, anything is fair game, including gulls. And I’ve had good luck with that approach, spotting everything from varieties of ubiquitous seagulls to oystercatchers to sandpipers to loons and osprey.
My favorites, however, are the flocks of small surf-loving birds: sanderlings, dunlin, and when I’m very lucky, plovers. Aside from being inherently cute due to their size, I find their antics captivating, their endless series of charges and retreats against the waves, their quick probing beak thrusts into the sand as they hunt, and their synchronized movements along the beach.
Photographing these flocks is challenging, as they grow wary of people at just about the same distance where they start to fit the frame of a 400mm lens. But the challenge is part of the fun, and I’ve spent hours happily pursuing them.
Pictured here are a flock of sanderlings at Chincoteague national Wildlife Refuge, during a visit in May. For whatever reason, there were fewer flocks of surf-loving birds during this visit, and it was only this one time that I was able to work with them