From Ice Swimmer. Seagulls / Oystercatcher / Crow. Love that wading Crow! All photos 1500 x 1000, click for full size.
All photos © Ice Swimmer, all rights reserved.
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Love the low-tide landscape shot with the oystercatcher. Particularly the layering of rocks/water/horizon/sky (color/grey/color/grey) combined with the layering in the rocks. I could stare at that picture for a long time.
I like the seagulls, something very intimate-looking (though with seagulls, who knows?). Nice work, Ice Swimmer!
The first picture is taken while sitting in cafe by the sea in Töölö, Helsinki. I posted about and other birds in TNET. The gulls are common gulls (Larus canus), in Finnish kalalokki (fish gull).
The second picture is taken on a rainy day. The place is sea shore near the park Kaivopuisto and the built-up islands are part of the historical Suomenlinna sea fortress. The Eurasian oystercatcher didn’t let me any closer.
The third picture is approximately from here. The crow (Corvus cornix, varis in Finnish) seemed to eat something from the water.
All three photos are taken this spring. Due to winds from east and north the sea level has 25 -- 40 cm below average, which has made these photos possible. I took the second from dry sea bottom.
Thank you!
rq @ 2
The smaller one was begging food from the bigger, who obliged.
“I took the second from dry sea bottom.”
Awesome. Reminds me of a trip to Alaska when I walked from Colt Island to Horse Island over a land bridge that only exists at low tide.
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/33489
That was also a rainy day when I took that shot.
Kengi @ 5
The wooded islands look so dreamy in your photo. Beautiful.
Baltic Sea doesn’t have significant tides, here the winds (both those that blow over the Gulf of Finland and the main basin of the Baltic Sea) have the main influence on the sea level.
“The wooded islands look so dreamy in your photo. Beautiful.”
The trick to taking great photos in Alaska is to point your camera away from your head and press down on the shutter button. Honestly, you can’t take bad pictures there.
Interesting about the sea level in the Baltic.
Not just the Baltic itself, but also rivers flowing into it: certain times of year (spring and autumn, as it were), there can be a very strong wind blowing in from the sea, and all the flood warnings go up for communities along the major river. If this coincides with the going of the ice in springtime, even worse (also the title photo here is pretty impressive).
Interesting photos at the links. Yeah, I can imagine how bad it could get when combined with ice-melt and spring rains.
Even without the winds driving the seas up into the rivers around here I’m always amazed at how high some rivers can flood. On the Des Plaines river west of Chicago I used to have a geocache series. You always think about how high the river will get when placing the caches. I put one of them in a tree up on a hill overlooking the river and it still ended up under water during a flood. It must have risen about 25 foot at that point one spring, which surprised me since the Des Plaines isn’t a very large river.
rq @ 8
The sea water packing into bottom of the bay and up the river, melting snow, ice dams and flat(?) land, that’s going to make a lot of houses wet, ouch.
Rivers flooding because of high water on the Gulf of Finland is an uncommon problem here, the sea has never risen more than 1.5 -- 2 m (since they began recording the levels). In Helsinki area the river Vantaa has rapids at the mouth of the river as does the biggest Finnish river draining into the Gulf, Kymijoki, 120-150 km east of Helsinki.
St Petersburg, Russia is another thing, they’re on the end the Gulf and get the highest sea level rises and (before they built a dam) they used to have huge problems with high sea levels making the river Neva flood on the city built on swamp, marshland and bogs.