CHEROKEE SUN PHOTOGRAPHY: Limpkin Chicks At Circle B Bar Reserve

Springtime is the time of year to get photos of young wildlife. This is especially true of birds, and one of my favorite birds in Central Florida is the Limpkin. They can grow to be pretty large, but it's the light brown and white feathers that really make them attractive.

Recently I was hiking through the Circle B Bar Reserve in Lakeland, FL that is home to lots of Limpkins and I came across a family of Limpkin parents and their 6 little ones. The parents were busy finding snails in the marsh, which is one of their staple foods, and then showing the chicks how to extract the snail from its shell for a good meal.

One of the great things about Circle B Bar Reserve is that it gets a great deal of human traffic going through it so many of the birds and other wildlife are fairly used to us and aren't nearly as skittish as they may be outside of the Reserve. This allowed me to get pretty close to the Limpkin family and get some great close-up shots. Of course, the parents had a wary eye on me for a while but when they saw that I meant no harm to their young they pretty much just ignored my presence and went back to the job of providing lunch for the kids.

I have said this before in many posts but it bears repeating again that if you want to get the best wildlife shots, it means that you have to get fairly close to do so. This means that you can't just barrel into their area and start firing away. A good wildlife photographer is patient and takes their time to slowly move closer without unnecessarily alarming the animal or bird. If done correctly, you can get closer than you would often imagine to get some great shots.

Here are some of the images I got of the Limpkin chicks: