TomKal foto

Although I managed to capture many species of hummingbirds, you can find there one description of all 22 species photographed in Costa Rica together. This time my expedition took longer and the light was better, I had therefore an opportunity to take many dynamic pictures. It is interesting that driving around Costa Rica after traveling several kilometers there were species of hummingbirds completely different from those we could observe earlier. Costa Rica is a small country (several percent of Polish territory) and in such a small area there is such a variety of species of hummingbirds. Wherever hummingbirds were: in roadside bars, hotels, there were drinking bowls which attracted dozens of them. The fact that hummingbirds were at hand does not mean that it was easy to take presented photos, especially those dynamic. They move so fast that there was no time to think for me nor for autofocus to set long time. Fortunately they behave fairly predictably, at least most of them. After quenching their thirst at the drinking bowl they flew 20-30 cm away and hovered in the air for a second - two, to see what was happening around. This is how the majority of the presented images were created. Hummingbirds often compete against each other and there is a lot of pushing and shoving between them. These air fights on the fly are virtually impossible to photograph. All this takes fractions of a second, covering several meters, what, with their filigree silhouette, makes it impossible to take satisfactory images. Hummingbirds were not afraid of people at all, and it happened that when I was shooting they sat on my shoulder. As it happens in nature photography, my contacts with hummingbirds resulted in pictures of different quantity and quality. So I have built new galleries, where because of excess of images I found it difficult to decide which of them include or exclude, and some that have very modest content. Just to identify the species correctly it was not  easy. Depending on the light the same bird could have for example dark green coloration at one moment, and after a while, when the lighting conditions changed, turned into a beautifully coloured bird with shimmering glittering plumage. In total I managed to photograph 22 of 50 species that occur in Costa Rica.