{"id":50682,"date":"2017-08-14T05:05:45","date_gmt":"2017-08-14T11:05:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=50682"},"modified":"2017-08-14T08:56:57","modified_gmt":"2017-08-14T14:56:57","slug":"the-highs-and-lows-of-my-morning-on-antelope-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2017\/08\/14\/the-highs-and-lows-of-my-morning-on-antelope-island\/","title":{"rendered":"The Highs And Lows Of My Morning On Antelope Island"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yesterday morning there were extremes of both including a case of mentoring gone bad.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"This was the scene that greeted me just after dawn (7:16 AM) yesterday morning toward the west end of the Antelope Island causeway looking north (if you’re on a small screen you won’t really\u00a0be able to appreciate it). To the left the lake reaches almost endlessly toward Gunnison Bay. To the upper right we see Fremont Island first (it’s more golden in color) and the Promontory Mountains behind it. The foreground is the slope of the shaded\u00a0causeway leading\u00a0toward the water.<\/p>\n

But the real\u00a0highlight was mixed flocks of Wilson’s and Red-necked Phalaropes. Hundreds and hundreds\u00a0of thousands of them. Every little speck you see on the water is a bird and almost all of them are phalaropes. The rustling sound coming from the feeding activities of that many birds was mesmerizing, especially in the peace and quiet of early morning. And this is only a tiny portion of the total – there were birds as far as the eye could see and stretching out of frame\u00a0for a great distance both left and right. These phalaropes use the Great Salt Lake as a staging area during migration so they can rest and fatten up on brine flies and brine shrimp before they continue their journey.<\/p>\n

Relatively few people in the world ever\u00a0see a sight like this and I consider myself very lucky to have the opportunity to experience it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

When groups of them take off briefly in murmurations they’re very difficult to photograph well but this photo should give you some idea of what it’s like.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

But things went downhill from there. Severely so.<\/p>\n

In sharp contrast to this portion of the lake the island itself\u00a0is almost a dead zone for birds right now. Most of the breeders have left and even magpies, meadowlarks and Horned Larks are hard to find. The only bird I photographed on the\u00a0island itself was a scruffy looking Sage\u00a0Thrasher still apparently feeding a fledgling (I suspect it may have re-nested, having failed the first time) and those photos will\u00a0likely be deleted.<\/p>\n

So we turned tail and headed for home thinking things couldn’t get any\u00a0worse. We were wrong.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

When we got to the Antelope Island Marina one of the four young boys with this woman was using an air rifle (seen here\u00a0in the woman’s left hand)\u00a0for “target practice” on a bottle they’d set on a post overlooking the marina\u00a0inlet where boats are stored on the water.\u00a0They were shooting from the edge of the parking lot. I immediately stopped along the road some distance away and while I was reaching for my camera to document what we were seeing Mia hollered out to them “Hey, you can’t be doing that here”. The woman responded “We’re only shooting at bottles” and Mia answered “Doesn’t matter,\u00a0you can’t be doing that here”. I should note that there were many\u00a0gulls and shorebirds directly behind the bottle and\u00a0just a little further away. What those boys were actually<\/em> shooting at I just don’t know.<\/p>\n

The woman retrieved the air rifle from the boy and here she’s about to put it in her trunk so we soon left the area (she was very aware I was photographing them). I reported the incident to the attendant at the entrance station\u00a0(including showing her one of my photos)\u00a0and she said that she’d “alert\u00a0my ranger”.<\/p>\n

What I observed and documented from these folks is beyond ill advised and unethical – it’s also illegal. I took the following from the Antelope Island State Park brochure:<\/p>\n