A Morning At Middle Creek

Early morning, March 19th found Coy Hill of Country Captures and I headed down the Pennsylvania Turnpike for Middle Creek Wildlife Management Area. There we met my daughter Amy of Ashe's Eye. The goal was to photograph the large flocks of snow geese and tundra swans that are usually in the area at this time of year, but unfortunately the main migration had moved on.

My favorite spot to begin a Middle Creek photo shoot, is where Kleinfeltersville  Road passes by the edge of the lake.  This affords a good view of the lake and a chance for dramatic photo opportunities as the sun rises. 

Middle Creek Lake-Before Sunrise

I concentrated on filming the scenery and the waterfowl as the sun came up, so I did not capture the actual moment of sunrise with still photos.  It is especially spectacular when large numbers of waterfowl, which have spent the night on the water, leave in vast flocks to feed in the surrounding fields, but this did not happen today as not enough birds were present.

Canada Geese And Other Waterfowl

Even though the large numbers of snow geese had moved on there were other species present, and the weather was superb, which made the day another outstanding experience in the great outdoors.

 Canada Geese

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Original content posted at  http://pawildlifephotographer.blogspot.com/ If this content appears elsewhere without proper accreditation, it is stolen content.

Blog Thieves

Thanks to a tip from a fellow photographer I found that all of my blog entries are being posted on Photo Grind.com without being properly credited to me. It seems they are doing this to a lot of other nature oriented blogs also. To add insult to injury they actually have a copyright notice on each page, so they steal your material and then claim copyright privileges to it.

Stealing Photos And Content-What A Way To Go

Photo by W.Hill Any unauthorized use of this is THEFT

It seems that they are enrolled in AdSense and use this ploy to bring readers to their site. One can file a complaint with Adsense, but they must list all of the posts that were stolen and this must be done by fax or e-mail.

In the future all posts on this blog will include the following:

Original content posted at  http://pawildlifephotographer.blogspot.com/ If this content appears elsewhere without proper accreditation, it is stolen content.

Late Winter In Pennsylvania's Elk Range-Part 2-Camera Critters

Mature Bull Stands In Timber-cut

In addition to grazing, elk also feed by browsing from trees and saplings. An active timber cut provides a prime food source as the tree tops that remain after the logs are cut and removed provide easy access to twigs and buds that are ordinarily out of the animal's reach.

 Mature Bull Browsing

This timber-cutting operation had just started on the day I arrived in Elk County, but a bachelor group of bulls had already found it.

Bulls Resting In Timber-cut: Note Largest Is Chewing His Cud (click to enlarge)

Three different animals are shown in this post, while five bulls were in the area. The largest bull in the last photo is not the same bull that is featured in the first two shots.

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Original content posted at http://pawildlifephotographer.blogspot.com/

Late Winter In Pennsylvania's Elk Range-Part 1

Late winter, and the bright glaring rays of the mid-day sun are almost blinding. While temperatures may be quite cold at night, they rebound to a great extent after sunrise and the snow cover shrinks rapidly. This is technically not good light for photography, yet I like to see photos of large herds of deer and elk taken under these conditions, as they portray that the end of bitter winter weather is near.

 Distant Herd Resting At Gilbert Viewing Area

Distant Herd Feeding On Recently Reclaimed Area: Gilbert Viewing Area

I was in Pennsylvania's Elk Country from Thursday afternoon until Sunday morning and had numerous encounters with the animals. At this time most interest is focused on the shedding of the antlers and "horn hunting". I heard reports of a few sightings of bulls that had already lost their antlers, but did not see any myself. The largest bulls usually shed first. It is possible to see large bulls with new antler growth, alongside raghorns, which still have last years antlers. During the next 2-3 weeks most of the antlers will be dropped.

Saturday morning found a bachelor group of young bulls feeding and sparring by Winslow Hill Road. One of the animals stood out above the rest and I took a portrait shot of him with a Canon 40-D and 500mmF4 lens.

An Outstanding Young Bull

This animal appears to have great potential and should grow a larger rack this year. The photograph was taken soon after sunrise resulting in much better colors than the first two photos, and of course there is no substitute for being reasonably close.

Stay tuned for more photos from the trip in the near future.