Towheeblog

Click here for link to a short series of bird portraits, head shots.  My favorite is the Shoebill.

My wife and I faced a Shoebill in a papyrus swamp on Lake Victoria, Uganda.  That is the look we got.  We were seated in a low dug-out, the papyrus reeds and the Shoebill stood above us.  The Shoebill was on a small mound next to a channel of water from which he was fishing.  It was hot, windless, humid.  Even the insects had stopped moving, it seemed.  The Shoebill at one point yawned.  His huge beak opening wide.  We were about twenty feet away and mostly he looked down that pointed, purposeful beak with both eyes.  He was over four feet tall and we were lower in every sense of that word.  “If you were fish…a single gulp.”

If you click here you can see some of my Shoebill shots (including yawn) from that memorable birding trip.  Plus a Hamerkop for bonus.

The Shoebill has been called a stork but it is actually a walking pelican.  It can fly, but when seen it’s nearly alway seen standing next to a fish-filled channel in the swamps where it lives.