Figure 1 – Common eider duck (female) Kennebunk Beach, Kennebunkport, Maine. (c) DE Wolf 2015.

I spent part of yesterday trying to photograph Common eider ducks – Somateria mollissima – off the Maine coast. These birds like to maintain their social distance, and who can blame them. There are stores at the nearby malls in Maine that feature pillows, comforters, and ski parkas stuffed with eider down. These are diving ducks and it was fun to watch them deliberately dive beneath the surface only to re-emerge a few minutes later with a fish in their moves. They then make a curious move, thrusting their fronts end out of the water and straightening their throats so as to swallow the fish whole.

The bird in Figure 1 is most probably a female. The males are dramatically black and white.  There were several males on a larger rock island, but these were too far off to capture clearly with my camera.

I am still studying the ins and outs of my big lens. I shot here very fast at f/6.3 or f/7.1, which appears to be the sharp focus sweet spot. It is remarkable how, even with a monopod, how hard it is to keep still long enough to set the focus on a distant bird. I need to explore using a tripod instead.

Canon T2i with EF100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM lens at 360 mm, ISO 1600, Aperture Priority AE mode 1/2500th sec at f/7.1 with +1 exposure compensation