Thank You Rick!!

I forgit that since she is not a mammal, her eyes wouldn’t have the same strange effect that mammalian eyes show on infrared. That was what I meant by “tell by her eyes.”

Thank You so much for sharing your camera and expertise!! It has been so fascinating to see her in her natural environment. THANK YOU!! 😀

That’s one of the 151 lagoons in The Landings. It’s romantically named “78” and is part of the network of lagoons that range from fresh water to brackish to salt water. The nest tree is probably 300 yards away from the salt marsh, and the lagoon is between the tree and the marsh. There’s another lagoon on the other side of the street, 79, that is connected to the marsh and 78 in turn connects to it via underground pipes with flow control so that runoff from heavy rain is captured and released slowly. Much of it finds it’s way into the aquifer to support the use of shallow wells for irrigation which reduces stress on the deep Floridan aquifer that stretches from GA into FLA.

Yes! The first egg was laid either Dec 31 or Jan 1. I believe it’s the latter, but we will have to review some video footage when we get the archives to see if we can pinpoint the date. The second about 3 days later, once again not positive, but we’ll figure it out!

The shadow is indeed infrared – and she doesn’t see it – if you watch in the evening as it pops on at dusk, and then in the morning as it blinks off at dawn, she doesn’t react at all. And if you look up at the nest at night, it’s pitch black up there. By “tell from her eyes” do you mean the amount of dilation of the pupils? If so, the explanation might be that it’s bright enough by starlight or moonlight (or streetlight – I think there’s one a block away) that she doesn’t have to dilate any further. FYI the “light” is an Illuminar IR148 13W.

Wow! Very impressive. At night she casts a shadow but you can tell from her eyes that it’s not infrared. Is a camera light on her at night?

We’ve got a Sony SNC-WR630 – Tim Sears our “rock star” camera expert knows far more than me. I am aware that this has got a lot of capabilities that one wouldn’t know they needed until they learned the hard way. For example it’s got gyroscope image stabilization so that even when zoomed the full 30X the image is nice and steady. Also some sort of automatic real time high dynamic range (HDR) range compression so that an image with bright sunlight where part of image is in deep shade will be compressed dynamically so that it’s all viewable and one part’s not over- and another part under- exposed.

Seems to be working now, but we removed the stream from the post, and put it permanently at the top of the home page. Try it now and see what you think.