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Great Lakes region, USA. April 2026.
Definitely a top 5 common bird around my parts. We're surrounded by rivers and lakes and these birds love hanging out by water. I love how different the females and males look.
Dude! The last two look like they were ripped right out of a nature magazine! I hear these guys all the time, but have yet to see any.
Wow! It looks like my blackbird put on some epaulettes.
Ha, yeah especially the last photo.
Exactly! Of course it likes hanging out near water - it's looking for Its Ship!
I haven't seen these for most of my life until I moved to a region where they are plentiful.
The first time I saw one I looked up something like "what is the name of a black bird with red wings." I was fairly amused by the answer.
The one in flight is fantastic.
Thanks, I assume you mean the silhouette photo. I'm glad I got that one. I'm rarely out early enough for golden hour and was struggling to find anything that morning. I didn't expect him to take off from that alder shrub, but he did and it looks pretty good.
I love a good silhouette (I'm not the one who made the original compliment), but that other one with the little bend to the feathers and the perfect lighting of the far wing is pretty great too. It would have been so easy to loose that detail, but that far wing caught the light just right. The rest of the composition for the contrasty silhouette might be ~~better~~ more popular, but that other one in flight is great too. Sure it's not super 'nat geo' sharp, but that just adds to the sense of motion here too.
Thanks. I don't take nearly enough flight shots. IIRC this was fairly early in the morning still and I had to bump up my ISO quite a bit to get this at 1/2500s. I use a budget super telephoto and this was at the extreme edge 300mm with wide-open aperture f/6.7 so it would have been soft even if it wasn't moving.
What a beautiful bird, and your shots are wonderful! thank you, this brightened my day.
Thank you for the kind words. It's my pleasure to share them. One of my only outlets of positivity nowadays.