During my hike through the Schellbruch I shot several photos of birds. It’s said that there are over 200 different species, that means it was not very difficult to see a few of them. I am not a bird expert, that means I had to research about several birds in my photos.
The following series of pictures maybe shows any kind of cormorant, that’s at least the conclusion of me and several people I showed the photos. What do you think?
I am pretty much sure it is a cormorant, but I am not sure what kind of cormorant. According to Wikipedia there are three types of cormorants in Germany, the great cormorant (Phalacrocorax carbo), the european shag or common shag (Phalacrocorax aristotelis) and the pygmy cormorant (Microcarbo pygmeus). I am not sure how to determine, it’s not easy to see any characteristics in my photos, the bird looks dark.
Talking about the photos, I want to mention that the gallery sequence is sorted as I shot the photos. I say this because you can see that the bird tried hard to take off and you can see it in the sequence if you go from the first to the last image. It was funny, and you could heard when the bird hit the water with the wings. I assume it’s much more difficult for big birds to take off, especially when they are wet from the water. I pretty much enjoyed to watch the birds there.
Diary of Dennis 
We have cormorants here too although probably a different type. They look similar but I’ve never been able to photograph one in flight. I’ve caught them perching while drying their wings a couple of times. The new camera is certainly good for action shots.
I find it interesting how animals vary from place to place… I asked Google and found this: http://www.ozanimals.com/wildlife/Bird/Cormorants.html
It seems you have the same Great Cormorant too, and a couple of different cormorants to ours as you said. It’s interesting that the body figure is almost the same but with different feather colours.
Yep, now that I featured out how to take photos in action, I am quite happy with the camera. I just had to find this special autofocus mode that is called AF-C (Autofocus Continuous). This allows me to press the shutter button half down and when I do this it will re-focus as long I press it half. Then I just need to press the shutter completely down to take photos. I had a hard time when I didn’t know this mode, but now I use this one for action and the results are fine and focused well 🙂
It’s so cool to watch birds land and take off. Like that 4th picture with the up turned wings a lot
Yes, I find it interesting too. In real you just have a few seconds to see the spectacle, but if you take photos as if you would use a machine gun, it’s later interesting to find all the details of the motion in all photos. However, shooting in burst mode makes it also difficult to decide for the best photo, so that I decided to upload just all sharp photos in a gallery.
The 4th photo is definitely interesting, that was the point where the bird seemed to take off but lost power and came closer to the water again to try a second time. 🙂 I guess big and wet birds need some time to take off 😀