An Afternoon with Boobies!

I bet when you read the posting title, you weren’t thinking Red-footed Boobies, were you?!

This great wildlife spectacle is at the Kilauea Nat’l Wildlife Refuge. You stand at the top of a cliff above a gorgeous Hawaiian cove with the sound of wind and waves echoing up from below. The Red-footed Boobies are simply way cool just to watch which is what we did for a while, along with the Humpback Whales.

These magnificent fliers just took the wind and flew circles around it. Their mastery of flight was well, worth not putting the camera up to the eye at first just to watch them soar in the clouds. Well, after a while it was time to get out the camera. It was a great couple of hours working the scene. It was really hard to get the boobies in the frame and it not be a butt shot. The wind was going the wrong direction so the boobies were flying away from us most of the time. But there were those times when a booby would buck the current and then you’d have the shot. Here’s a little MooseCam so you can see what I mean.

It was great fun to just stand there and guess which booby would come in close, fly in the right direction and create they photo in front of the right cloud. I’m going back there!

Photos captured by D3x, 200VR on Lexar UDMA digital film