So I'm a little late getting this blog posted since these photos were taken last Sunday, but I got lazy over the week and didn't end up editing any of these until earlier today. Actually, I went to Galveston today to visit my friend Trish who came back from Hawaii and is moving to St. Louis soon so I'm just going to say it's appropriate for me to post them on a day I went to Galveston again.
Last Sunday I went to Galveston to meet up with my friend Alyssa and her boyfriend Joe for brunch. I took my camera down with me to see if I could get some decent shorebird photos. After we went our separate ways I drove out to east beach, but didn't find any birds or scenery I liked. 
On the way back I saw a kitesurfing kite flying over by the Galvestonian so I decided to stop off and go to the beach there. By the time I got the camera ready and walked out to the beach the kitesurfer was bringing in his kite since there wasn't enough wind for his equipment. I ended talking to him and his wife for a while and I found out he owned a kitesurfing store in Clear Lake and moved here recently from Florida.
After that I started walking down the beach and found a few flocks of birds, mostly seagulls and sandpipers. I settled in with a few different flocks and started shooting. 

One bird in particular caught my eye, I believe he was the alpha of the group. The reason why I thought that is because he definitely had the biggest personality and was chasing the other members around every time they would group up to feed in one spot. A wave would roll in and out, and when it receded some birds would gather in one spot to try and dig some food out of the sand. Whenever there would be a higher concentration this little guy would run over from where ever he was, chase them off, and claim that spot to eat. This went on constantly and made for an interesting photo opportunity to try and catch him running around.

Well, I was trying to break up this post a little more so it wasn't just two galleries of photos, but there wasn't much of a story to this one. There doesn't really need to be a story to every blog post I guess as long as I had fun taking the photos and wanted to share them. Happy trails.

This weekend was my first attempt at submitting some of my photos to different magazines and contests to get published. I now realize how time consuming and how much effort it takes for freelancers to get their work published. I'm only looking at roughly 6 different publications and they all have different file format, size, metadata, and story and/or caption information requirements. Fortunately I can make use of excel to track the differences otherwise I would be trudging through that mess every time. Anyway, here's a list of the websites I'm looking at right now and some details on what I've submitted this weekend. Now you've seen most of these photos already from my Wildlife page, but I wanted to include them again on this post since I wanted to give you an idea of which ones I'm sending out. 

http://www.tpwmagazine.com/
https://www.nwf.org/
http://www.discoverwildlife.com/
http://www.defenders.org/
http://wildplanetphotomagazine.com/

Anahuac Wildlife Refuge is about 75 miles east of Houston and is a great place to visit in March to April every year to catch the Spoonbill mating season. After leaving the rookery I went to the other locations in the refuge and there was a fence on one side of the road out to East Bay. On the way back from the end of the road I saw this little guy preening so I pulled over, it started to rain as I was shooting and she stopped, tucked her head in, and just sat there waiting out the Spring shower.

While on vacation to the Outer Banks North Carolina in July 2014 I was shooting a few families of ospreys. One day we decide to take the boat out to go fishing and on the way out of the canal by our beach house there were more ospreys perched on the pilings. We slowed down to a crawl while I got out my camera and most didn't even bother to leave as we went by, lucky for me.