By Vladimir Brezina
To fish, you need a lot of patience…
… and hope that, sooner or later, you’ll get lucky!
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More Florida fishing birds are here.
Copyright
Wind Against Current by Vladimir Brezina and Johna Till Johnson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.Authors
Vladimir Brezina (RIP)
... kayaked the waters around New York for more than 15 years in his red Feathercraft folding kayak. He was originally from (the former) Czechoslovakia and lived in the U.K. and California before settling down in New York. He was a neuroscientist at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. He died in 2016.Johna Till Johnson
... is a kayaker and technology researcher at Nemertes Research. She's an erstwhile engineer, particle physicist, and science fiction writer. She was born in California and has lived in Italy, Norway, Hawaii, and a few other places. She currently resides in New York City.Recent Comments
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Wind Against Current 
Beautiful fotos!!! Here in my place i need a strong tele to watch them, they are too shy. People, who have a little garden pond with fishes, Kois f.e. , don’t like theme very much, but i love them, especially the black feather on their head :) .
Nice greetings Anja
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Every time I go down to Florida, I am amazed by how unshy the birds there are. They let you get really close…
Thanks, Anja!!
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Not too shy!
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You might even say, quite aggressive… :-)
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:D , it’s again the best example for it always depends from where you write the comment ;) . And i’m sure, in this case the photograph has more fun than the fisherman :roll: … :)
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Wait, it’s getting complicated! We’ve got three parties involved: the fisherman, the bird, and the photographer… or four if you include the fish. Who has the most fun?
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I am sure, the photograph :) ! For the fish, i really think, it’s no fun :( .
But the Makros from their eyes – incredible for me, beautiful!
But, an attack from these birds, i also wouldn’t prefer, so you’re right, ok;) !
Have a nice day with nice motives, less dangerous :) …
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Thank you for clearing that up, Anja! ;-) :-)
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fun photos and commentary, thanks vlad! our birds don’t let you come that close … when we were in the canoe yesterday (with little electric motor) they still flew before we got within good photo range … however i got a few … plus thinking of you i shot a fisherman in his Hobie, which i will put in the next post :-)
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I look forward to seeing it! :-)
(… although shooting people is a bit controversial in the US these days…)
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oh i can imagine … it will probably get like that here too … we always follow your lead if there is money to be made from it!
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Following the US is not always the wisest strategy… ;-)
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Great photos!
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Thank you!!
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hehe…this is very cute fishing scene….
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:-)
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How can these birds be so not afraid of people? Never had a heron so close to me outside of a zoo before… They’d rather fly away if I tried to come close…
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They’ve learned to live with people there much like pigeons do in urban environments—they’ve learned that people won’t bother them, so they come close to wait in the interstices of the human activities for scraps to fall off the table…
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Great captures, Vladi!
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Thanks!!
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I swear, I can’t get within 100 miles of a Great Blue Heron with my camera, and here they are posing for you!
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Go to Florida—it’s a paradise if you want to take close-up photos of birds…
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When I fished somewhere like that, I found the Herons very intimidating, especially when they managed to get on an eye-line higher than mine!
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They are big birds, especially when they spread their wings…
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:)
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This makes my day! Great Blue Herons are our friends and companions in the Puget Sound, too, though they don’t typically come for feeding.
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They are everywhere—up here around NYC as well, although in the city we mostly have egrets…
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Wonderful photos. Looks like you had a lot of competition with the birds for the fish. :)
BE ENCOURAGED! BE BLESSED!
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Once the fish are caught by their human attendants, the herons move in for the feast…
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Fantastic captures.
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Thanks so much!!
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Beautiful pictures with wonderful colours!
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Glad you like them—thanks, Anna!
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Lovely selection of photos!! Love the idea of the birds waiting to be handed some fish!!
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Clearly, they get enough to make the waiting worthwhile…
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Love the story these photos tell – fishermen are fishermen, whatever the species!
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That’s very true! :-)
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Sometimes it pays to be friendly ;-). Great shots!
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Thanks!!
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Did the birds have better success than the humans? More fun to watch I’m sure
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The birds are waiting for the humans to hand them the catch… must be wonderful to have the humans so well trained!
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Looks like the Heron was posing just for you!
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He/she was certainly posing for the cameras!
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We watched someone share their bait fish with a heron when we were on vacation. Not only are fishermen (and women) patient, they have big hearts.
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Although they might not admit it, I think the fishermen quite like the birds…
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The pelicans and herons have quite a racket going. Let the humans do the work.
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It’s obviously working for them… behind pretty much every fisherman in Florida there seems to be a heron, patiently waiting…
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Especially love the second photo of the three patient fishers, all in a row.
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:-) Patience was definitely needed. I didn’t see that woman catch anything the whole time i was there—and so the birds were out of luck too…
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Love that cheeky heron in the first pic. I’m really missing my Florida birds.
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Yes, they are very special :-)
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what can you do but laugh
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Indeed! :-)
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Rofl at that first photo, where the heron is facing away from the water. Great photos. Do you notice any difference between the Florida and Northern US varieties of great blues? Although it would be hard to tell in February if the heron in Florida is actually just another “snowbird” wintering over down south.
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Haven’t noticed any difference, but I don’t have a huge amount of close-up experience with the great blue herons up here in the Northeast. Here they seem to much more shy than they are down in Florida, and are hard to approach. Egrets, on the other hand…
I notice in looking at my Florida birds photos after the fact that most of the birds in them are banded. Interesting…
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That is interesting, that they have been banded. I suppose they were easy for the banders to catch (as they seem so unafraid of humans). There was a Canada Goose here with a neck band. It was with a large flock, but noticeably less timid than it’s mate and the rest of the flock. Intuition tells me that perhaps it had been handled a lot by humans, perhaps due to an injury? It was very tame, came right up to the kayak and posed agreeably for photos, such a ham.
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We saw cormorants that behaved like that on our most recent Florida trip.
At the end of the second day, we were approaching Sarasota, and suddenly a succession of cormorants flew in, one after another, and plopped themselves down in the water a couple of feet in front of our kayaks. Then they followed us as we paddled along, diving under the boats and rubbing themselves against the hulls expectantly… There were many kayak fishermen in the area who had presumably been feeding them.
Here is Johna telling them that, unfortunately, we had nothing to offer them—
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Awesome, and thanks for the link to Johna’s post. I lived in Sarasota for 8 years – I’m an alum of New College – but that was before I became possessed by the herons. (Hard to imagine there was a “before herons.”)
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We still have to write up that day, and the following days… The problem is that new trips keep happening :-)
I am so glad to have discovered your site for all things heron-related…
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Oh, many thanks for the kind word about finding my herons, and I’m equally happy to have found your site, with all of your kayaking adventures. I like how you and Johna mix it up, including the technical details about the kayak aspects of your outings (such as the boat repair in the Florida trip) and the fascinating photos from your outings.
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Speaking of new trips, the outing you two took this past weekend to Sandy Hook was amazing, and the water conditions had such a high degree of difficulty! Great write-up.
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It started as a kayaking blog, but soon spread into whatever else we happen to find interesting… Thanks!! :-)
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You’re welcome, and that’s part of what makes your blog so good, plus you have two authors, so different and complimentary perspectives,. :-)
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Glad you liked our Sandy Hook trip! It wasn’t that difficult, actually, in any technical sense—just a lot of things that suddenly came together, as they often do, to make it a bit more exciting ;-)
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You and Johna should submit some of your stories/photos to the various paddler magazines. I spent 14 years in publishing (medtech and electronics, not kayaking unfortunately), and your collective works are interesting enough!
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Three of the posts on Wind Against Current (this one, and this, and this) did actually appear in a relatively obscure kayaking magazine that no longer exists…. but yes, we might move in that direction again sooner or later…
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Loved the word picture of the whale encounter on the Cape Cod trip.
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That was memorable… the one and only time! :-)
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Therre will be another, when you least expect it! :-)
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