I agree Stephen, the first time I saw a couple of Vulture shots from Gustav I got that same vertigo feeling, brilliant shots. Some great bird shots posted from all. Robbie with that great Avocet photo you have, there is an Avocet here, our particular model has a buff coloured head and neck instead of the black and white one, the rest of it seems to be about the same, (I don't have a photo but it's in the bird book), also the duck with the strange wattle thingy, there is a duck here called a Musk duck (again no photo) with a strange wattle below the bill instead of above it, but I don't think I've ever seen one, although who could say with any certainty when you gaze out over a large collection of mixed water birds. And to me that's the trouble with water birds and especially shorebirds, the difficulty of identifying them from a distance, what with the amount of types that look the same or similar, the oystercatchers, stilts incl.(avocets), phalaropes, pratincoles, don't seem so bad but when you get into sandpipers, shanks, curlews (nomadic migratory), godwits, dowitchers, snipe, knots, tattlers, stints etc. there are pages of em, and from 50M a lot of them look very similar, so I sort of never really got into shorebirds much myself, although I do like lake and swamp type birds even if they are hard generally to photograph....sigh, so many birds, so little time.
Greg
when would you like the photo of the Red Necked Avocet? I'll see what I can do.