Herons On The Nests And Superzoom cameras.

It's become kind of a local tradition for those who know where to find the heron rookery (aka heronry) to check on the status of the number of herons on the nests. It's about a half a mile walk down the hill to the flood zone of the Wangunk Meadows. If you look carefully you might be able to make out the little dark spots in the tops of those trees.

Those little dark spots are actually nests with Great Blue Herons on them. Sometimes it's amazing what a $300 dollar camera can do. The picture quality can't compete with an slr but the zoom capability is really amazing! I've had my Canon sx50 for a few years. It allows up to 50x but there is one that I saw that goes up to 125x!

 If you compare the nests in the top picture to this one it gives you an idea of how much magnification we're talking about.  The high magnification comes at a cost though. The more you zoom in the more the image degrades. On a nice sunny day it can do okay though and it sure helps people like me who hate fiddling around with camera settings.