Posadas - Day 5
We were due to take a boat across the river to a deep, narrow bay on the Argentine side of the river near Paraguay, which is a quiet backwater about 25 metres wide, and whose banks are lined with trees full of assorted birds and monkeys. The wind had really picked up overnight and was blowing with enough force to turn the river into a welter of large breaking waves; it was not practical to take the boat across 10 or 15k of open water in the teeth of the wind and with large breaking waves so our trip was postponed until the afternoon, weather permitting.
While we waited I managed to download photos from V's and my assorted 5 cameras and I worked on the blog and got caught up to date. Day very hot in spite of the wind so I sat in the shade of of the screened-in veranda of the estancia, out of the wind and the sun and typed happily away for a couple of hours.
By 4 the wind had abated and we set out with a very pleasant British couple who are also photographers and travelers who have spent a lot of time in Africa. Shared stories while we chugged across the river to the canal. Poked along its length for a couple of hours and got some great shots of toucans, monkeys, two different species of woodpeckers, and a variety of job-lot birds.
Bird photography really is a specialist sport, I was using a Canon 7D with a 300mm 2.8 lens and a 1.4 lens extender, which gives me an apparent reach of 670mm which is not nearly long enough and weighs about 4.5k to boot; not easy to handhold steadily on firm ground far less in a rocking boat. V and the other couple on the other hand were using small Panasonic traveling cameras that could create an apparent 1200mm reach or almost twice the length of mine and resolve their images twice as close as I could with cameras that weighed about 400g. This is one occasion when I would have happily traded all the fancy gear for a more manageable point and shoot.
Nonetheless think I got a couple of keeper shots and was happy to have had the experience. Home to dinner, stuffed quail, a good bottle of wine, and so to bed.
