Along Illinois Route 71 west of Ottawa, Illinois, on the way to Starved Rock State Park there are pull offs which provide a view of the Wide Waters area of the Illinois River. This area was created when the Starved Rock Lock and Dam was built in the 1930s. The water is very shallow close to shore which allows water fowl to walk and feed.

At different times of the year the water fowl  can be viewed easily with binoculars or a telephoto lens.  A 300mm lens is the minimum focal length you would need but a 400 or 500mm lens is better. A teleconverter of 1.5 or 2x is helpful but using a teleconverter does reduce the light gathering capabilities and lowers the sharpness of the image. While a tripod is better to keep the camera steady, the image stabilization lenses offered now can reduce the need for a tripod and enable you to react more readily to the birds actions. 

If you are using a digital camera with an APS sized sensor, a 400mm lens becomes a 600mm lens on Nikon and Fuji cameras, and on Canon cameras which has a 1.6 factor, a little longer focal length is obtained.  

In the summer time, white egrets, gray herrons and Canadian geese are plentiful. In the spring and later in the fall, pellicans stop to feed while migrating. In the winter, eagles will come down from the north, since the Illinois River is usually ice free.

This photograph was taken in 2003 using a Canon D60 which is a 6 megapixel single lens reflex camera. A 400mm Sigma telephoto lens was used.

Just before you would start the ascent up into Starved Rock State Park, there is a park called Lone Point Shelter Park. It has boat ramp access and offers views of Starved Rock across the wide waters area. From the parking lot, you can take a path westward for about 100 yards and there obtain a better view of the Rock as well as the bluff on the south side of the Illinois River that ends at Lovers Leap which is just east of the Rock. This photograph was taken in the fall when thousands of pellicans spent about a month nourishing themselves for their migration.

What is neat about pellicans is that they fly in perfect formation. They also take off in a formal way. I call this photograph "stair stepping pellicans" because of the orderly way they left the water. In another photograph the pellicans were lined up and each pellican took his turn taking flight similar to jets leaving an aircraft carrier. In another photograph I took the pellicans reminded me of Japanese Zeroes (which were planes used during World War II) because of their perfect formation in flight.

With the number of pellicans present the day I took the subject photograph, it was easy to snap away because great images were everywhere. With the other birds on the Wide Waters, patience and timing are essential. The best times to photograph are in the early morning and as the sun is setting, because the birds are taking flight and landing. Even at those times, patience is needed because the birds spend quite a bit of time preening their feathers.

While not demonstrated in the subject photograph, the lighting as the sun is setting provides colorful backgrounds especially on the water.

All photographs get some tweaking in Photoshop whether I shoot with a digital camera or scan slides or film negatives.

On my website, I have several pages which are titled Wide Waters. You can access them by clicking on the Archive Page link on the first page of my sight and finding the link for Wide Waters.

Skip Hupp