3rd post about today's trip -- groups of birds

Okay, now we get to the main reason for Agmon Hula -- the birds, thousands of them. According to the brochure they gave us, about half a BILLION birds migrate through this area every year! Here's a view of just a few of those.

Many of the water birds like to stand on tiny islands in the lake, like this one. Isn't this a lovely group of ducks? By the way, I have the maximum optical plus digital zoom on my camera to thank for this picture. :-)

Getting pictures of birds in flight is much trickier, though. I discarded at least 3 or 4 pictures that turned out to contain only empty sky instead of the birds I was hoping to capture. However, some did turn out. Here's a group of 11 birds flying together. I think that they may be cranes, but I'm no expert on this at all. In any case, they were LARGE birds, and they made a lot of noise, too! In fact, all the birds at Agmon Hula were making noise, and it was quite a beautiful chorus.

Here's one of the pictures where I got REALLY lucky!

This was another very lucky shot. In fact, I had intended to photograph this pair as they stood on the ground, but just as I snapped the picture, they took off. In reality, I cropped this view from almost the extreme upper right corner of the picture my camera actually got.

Here's another interesting group of birds. The zoom also gets a lot of credit here, since these birds seemed to keep far away from people.