| Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge by André Costantini |
On a recent trip down to the west coast of Florida I had the opportunity to visit Ding Darling. I had been down to that part of the world before around the greater area of Fort Myers and Naples having spent many a days at Audubon’s Corkscrew swamp preserve which is a sanctuary for birds and wildlife located in the Florida swamps. Even eight years ago when I first visited, there was nothing in miles of the place. Today, condos and strip malls quickly encroach the wilds’ of southwest Florida. I had heard of Ding Darling from a fellow photographer who had been there before to photograph the wildlife of the swamp. Ding Darling is located on Sanibel Island, west of Fort Myers and north and west of Naples. Ding Darling was actually a real live person. He was a cartoonist and conversationalist and a big hunter himself. He was appointed under Franklin Roosevelt to be the Director of the US Biological Survey, the forerunner to the US Fish and Wildlife service. By requiring hunters to buy stamps in order to hunt he created funding to buy land to preserve. One such place is the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island. I went there on a Friday afternoon in the winter, which was 50% right. Winter is the best time to go for wildlife, however Fridays are the one day of the week that you can’t drive in (only hike). “As this is supposed to give the birds a day off,” I was told by one of the rangers. Ironically I saw several birds in the parking lot, which led me to believe that obviously there were at least some birds that couldn’t live a day without humankind. On a hike into the preserve we happened upon a gaggle of white ibis. Or maybe it is an ibiaggle of ibis, though in any case it was a nice group perched in a tree. And as they seemed to be quite occupied with each other, they seemed to pay little attention to me, it allowed me the opportunity to get quite close and get some really tight shots. Wildlife that is used to the presence of human visitors allows you to get relatively close, which is nice even when you have a long lens. This way your images are even tighter, as you can see from this headshot of the white ibis, handheld with the Tamron 70-300 lens at 300mm wide open at f5.6 and the shutter speed was at 1/1250th of a second. This allowed me to be pretty sure that I wouldn’t risk any camera shake. The wider shot was at 140mm of a nearby bird also shot wide open at f5.6 was taken at 1/2000th of a second. The third image was yet another bird obviously moving but easy freezable motion at 1/4000th of a second.
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