With quite a few things going on at the moment I have had to grab at some opportunities rather than my usual more planned approach, with a weather and time window from Monday to Wednesday this week I headed back to a site where I have been working on Golden Plover, a bird I wanted far better coverage of.It turned out to be 3 fantastic days of intensive photography, all the local birds wanted their picture taken I think; the weather was not quite as forecast, however the rain was a bonus as it gave me some great shots of Lapwing sheltering her chicks. The 5am starts led to some great views and images of Black Grouse (taken from the car!), and the Golden Plover were just fabulous posers, I have kept about 500 images of them and will post more when I've processed them.
You can't really go through the year without having a Puffin fix, this week I made the pilgrimage to Seahouses and headed out to "Puffinland" on Billy Sheil's "Glad Tidings" a glorious day, great weather,sunburn and the best Fish and chips in the universe from "the Pinnacles" chippy afterwards...... heaven!Lots more Terns, Seals, Kittiwakes etc from the day on my Flickr gallery.
As usual this summer I have maintained the water levels in a pool on some local farmland, it is always productive with lots of species visiting to drink and bathe, this week I have also had up to 8 Swallows visiting to collect mud for their nests. There has been Linnets and Goldfinches too, plus a Corn Bunting, several Yellow Wagtails, a family of Pied Wagtails and the recently fledged youngsters and lots of Starlings.The Starlings turn up caked in mud and poo from the nearby dung heap where they forage for dungfly larvae, they really look like they enjoy their bath as well; its great to watch them!
The Common Swifts are back around my home, I spent a long time on these and deleted a very large portion of the shots taken, but well worth the effort for the few good images I got from the session. The "rooftop" one's are taken from my bedroom window.
Tree Pipit, this is a bird that has eluded me for ages, I had photographed them on that funny old stuff called film long ago, and I had got a few distant frames on my old D30, (the bird must have covered about 12 pixels).Yesterday a good mate called me to say he had found a very showy bird, but I was all fully booked with family running around jobs for the day; however I was out at dawn today and had a very pleasant 3 hours of the bird all to myself, some of several gigs worth of images are shown below, theres lots more left to process.
A few days of local photography, mainly at the Yellow Wagtail site as I have been doing a fair amount of work on them, but mainly I have been working on a few projects that are commissioned and need to show images at the end of each day; and I've had a couple checks at the hospital, as well as cameras back to Canon for a check-up! together these have stopped me travelling far from home (except for 2 days up a Welsh mountain, see my jets blog), however I'll soon be out and about shooting stock a bit further afield.A few early starts have been good for Barn Owls, Song Thrush, Hare and other common subjects, I was very happy with the whole Pheasant at dawn sequence.
Yellow Wagtails, these have always been a favourite bird of mine, late April and May is the time when they use a local dung heap as a migration "service station" , very many come through, I have seen as many as 74 there all at once, and usually one or two stay to raise a brood or two. The dung is not the most photogenic of settings but it produces huge numbers of bugs and larvae.The whole countryside has a predominance of yellow all around, Oil-seed Rape that almost glows in the dark covers great expases of arable land and theres a good show of Dandelions too.
