Hoatzin

Here's one from our trip to Eastern Ecuador and the Napo River which is one of the main tributaries into the Amazon. Sani Lodge is located on an oxbow lake and it is blessed with a lot of Hoatzins which live around the lake. This species is locally known as the "stinky turkey" as it smells quite bad, it's meat is rancid and therefore nothing preys on it. All of this is quite good for the Hoatzin because it doesn't move around all that fast or fly particularly well. It's young are unique in that they have small claws on their wings to help them clamber about in the trees.

This is full frame shot from a canoe. It's a bit tight, particularly on the feet, but for me the dramatic pose makes up for that. A bit of noise reduction on the bg. To apply the noise reduction I select only the bird and perch with the magnetic lasso tool in ps, using settings of feather 3 pixels and width 10 pixels, hit select, inverse and then apply noise reduction by selecting filter, noise and using settings of 8, 50 and 50 in CS3.

Mk3 500F4 1/250 F4 iso 1000, evaulative metering -0.3, Handheld from canoe