Chinese Pond Heron - Kunming, China - 2007
/The Chinese Pond Heron (Ardeola bacchus) is a freshwater bird found in east Asia through Indonesia.
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Chinese Pond Heron - Kunming, China - 2007
Photo taken during lunch on the patio of a restaurant adjacent to Green Lake in Kunming in Nov. 2007. I was with colleagues from the Kunming Institute of Zoology and they were a little surprised when I suddenly reached for my camera bag, pulled out the D80 with 300mm f/4 and 1.7x teleconverter and moved to the rail along the patio. When first spotted, the bird was at a distance, but, amazingly, it kept moving closer and closer until I was able to get some good shots.
Chinese Pond Heron - Kunming, China - 2007
Why was I in Kunming? At the time I retired (Jan. 1, 2005) my research was being supported by a grant from the National Eye Instutute (NEI) and funds had been approved until 7/31/2007. But once the decision had been made to retire, when postdoctoral fellows left the lab to accept faculty positions it was not possible to hire replacements because the lab would not be active long enough for an adequate training experience. After a couple of departures, I realized I no longer had enough people in the lab to complete the experiments that I had proposed. After discussion with the NEI and chairman of the Department of Neuroscience there was an agreement to terminate the grant 7/31/2005 after postdoctoral fellow Xintian Hu (Ph.D. from Princeton) had finished collecting data for one of the key experiments under the supervision of a fellow faculty member. Xintian had already accepted a position at the Kunming Institute of Zoology and the Institute had agreed to purchase most of the equipment in my lab from Baylor College of Medicine and transport it to Kunming. The NEI grant that was terminated in July 2005 had been funded continuously since May 1, 1973 with competitive renewals every 3 or 5 years. This is a major reason I have never considered entering a photo contest. Forty years of competing for grant funds satisfied my need for competition.
(continued below)
Chinese Pond Heron - Kunming, China - 2007
After seeing the pond heron from the restaurant, I returned to Green Lake the next weekend and was able to get additional photos of the herons that did not include the wire fence.
(continuation) In 2006 I spent a month in Kunming helping Xintian set up his lab and working on the analysis of the data he had collected in my lab. Betty joined me for a couple of weeks. In 2007 Betty, Sadie (one of our granddaughters) and I spent a week in Beijing. Xintian was our expert guide. Betty and Sadie returned to the U.S. and I spent another month in Kunming finishing the data analysis and writing the manuscript. The paper was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science in 2007. link
Chinese Pond Heron - Kunming, China - 2007
The nonbreeding adult Chinese Pond Heron "has a golden brown to buff streaked head. The bill is yellow with a dusky upper bill and dark tip. The irises are gold yellow and lores are green yellow. The chin is white, whereas the neck and throat are streaked white, brown and golden buff. The back is olive brown, with the feathers tending to cover the wings. Wings are white with the outer flight feathers having an olive brown tinge. The legs are yellow. " Source
Chinese Pond Heron - Kunming, China - 2007