13 May 2007

Ted Morris, the president of PPDRDG emailed me a few days ago with a request a for photographs of the birds of Diego Garcia, if I would be so kind as to share them with him. Being as I had very few photographs of birds I figured I should make some sort of effort to actually take a picture of a bird if I wanted to send him any. These are the results of today's minimal efforts to that extent, though I did walk about for two and a half hours looking for the furry creatures. Instead of taking my SLR camera, because its big and bulky and requires lots of lenses, and I had already done lots of picture taking things the two days before. I thought I would cheat and use my nice little point and shoot camera that only weighs a few ounces. For what it is it performed quite admirably, but as it turns out, most birds here on Diego Garcia are rather skittish of people. As a result I was not able to get very close to the birds, and without my telephoto lens good close-ups were all but impossible even with its 4X zoom. All the pictures on this page are crops of the original pictures which results in fairly poor quality photos. But if I hadn't cropped the pictures about all you would see would be little bird looking dots amid a field of blue or white. Now as you scroll down this page you will probably notice that I have a few pictures of crabs. You may comment to yourself that if I was taking pictures of birds that it is strange that I have nearly as many pictures of crabs. Well there is a reason for this. As I mentioned before, birds are rather skittish. So are crabs, but they cant fly away, they can scurry into holes or under and behind rocks and so are hard to get pictures of as well. But one distinct advantage you have with crabs is that they have to stay on the ground and are thus forced to stay much closer to you and your camera. Another advantage is that you can sometimes corner them wherein they will freeze for a few seconds before skitting off to some safe place. This behavior of the crabs allowed me to get more "good" or more likely "ok" pictures of the crabs than I did of the birds despite the fact that I took over 300 pictures of the birds. The "forest crabs" were the easiest as often they were not near a hole or log and there are 10 or 20 of the little crustaceans in as many feet, so your bound to be able to get a picture of one of them. They also have those little awesome eyes that say "I'm hiding he cant see me, I'm hiding he cant see me".

Black Napped Terns

Brown Noddys

	Warrior Crab, These are the crabs that started the revolt.
Forest Crabs*. Much smaller than the Warrior Crabs, while both types of crabs live in the jungle the Forest Crabs have the advantage of camouflage, stealth, and will lay in wait for an ambush. They can also hide themselves for protection more easily than the Warrior Crab, though they lack the brute strength and audacity of the Warrior Crabs.	Ok I'm making the term Forest Crab up but it fits as that is where you find these guys, but the Warrior Crabs actually are Warrior Crabs and I think it can easily be seen why.