Grey Heron / Blauwe Reiger (Ardea Cinerea) #4

It's called ballet... :)

This is the story behind this shot (all the others are deleted to bring down my collection to 100):

It's Winter, freezing, cold, water turned ice and the birds are having a difficult time. So I go to the park everyday with lots of food to help them. One bird I cannot feed is the Heron as they don't eat any of the regular bird food. But of course when I arrive and start laying out the stuff, they too hurry my way. And I feel awful to see them standing there and not getting any.
So I was in the pet shop where I buy my bird seed and mentioned this and the lady cheerfully said: you could feed them one day old chicks. I don't know if 'one day old chicks' is the correct English term, but it's the male offspring of a chicken who's meat is not fit for human consumption and who are therefore economically useless. They are killed en masse (some 30 million a year over here). I am strongly against this. In Dutch they are called 'eendagskuikens'.

However, standing in the pet shot I had to make a quick decision and thinking that those chicks in the shop's freezer were already dead and could help other birds survive, I ended up buying a bag full of them, frozen solid. I left them in my bicycle shed over night to defrost and yesterday took them to the park and fed them to the Herons. By then that solidly frozen block had of course turned into a big bag full of dead chicks. The Herons loved them though and apparently the word spread and never before have I seen so many Grey Herons in one spot! But as I was throwing the chicks unto the ice I felt a complete barbarian. What makes it even worse is that I came home with a card full of pictures. Never mind the moral dilemma, I am a bird photographer and there's some action going on!

Well, tonight I looked at the pictures and processed a few. I will probably upload some more in the coming days, but here are just a few.

Light was not good by the way and kept changing on me.
This particular Heron was wet and his back looked muddy and I had great difficulty processing the image. It still doesn't look quite right to me.