Upde Designs

I know I told you I would post images from my Saturday adventure and I will as the week unfolds.  It was an enjoyable day and I saw many things of interest.

Friday on the way home I went by the Hurstville Nature Center and saw two swans coming in for a landing.  I thought this was very unusual because the resident swans were at the South end of the pond and over the years I can’t remember too many occasions when there were other swans at the pond.

I parked the car and hurriedly got my camera out and turned on.  The two swans that had just landed started swimming side by side toward the two resident swans at the South end of the pond.  They were alternatively raising and lowering their head, swimming slowly toward the other couple and honking with a very loud voice.

All of a sudden one of the intruding swans (I presume the male) started running / flying towards the resident male swan.  The female resident swan flew off to the North end of the pond and the two males went head to head for about 20 minutes.

Each raising and lowering their head and loud honking at each other.  They never seemed to touch each other but they did a lot of posturing.

After 20 minutes of this and burning about 200 images (thinking I was going to see a rumble) I was just about ready to leave when the resident male fluttered his wings and started a running take off towards the intruding male.

The two intruder swans and the resident male swan flew huge circles around the pond for several minutes.  Usually the resident swan was behind the intruding pair and finally the two intruders broke off and headed West.  By the way I shot up another 90 images of this flying around stuff.

Above the victorious male swan returns to the pond after successfully defending his territory.  He landed very close to his mate and then the two of them swam the entire length of the pond.  Apparently they wanted to make sure that everything was still in order.

The entire situation lasted about 50 minutes.   I shot 311 images and culled them down to 176.  Most of them look a like but I couldn’t bring myself to delete them. 🙂

I hope you had a great weekend.  The weather sucked yesterday for photography but I spent 11 hours Saturday with camera in hand.  It was a very enjoyable day and I’m anxious to share the details and the images of the day with you.

Thanks for stopping by.  Remember the Worldwide Photo Walk is next week.  If you have any desire to join the walk just go to my web site Upde.net and click on the Photo Walk Logo.