A Halcyon Day

LEIGHTON MOSS – AVOCETS, HARRIER ACTION, A MAD LAPWING AND A MAGIC MOMENT

25th May 2013

May has been a busy month and I have had little time for photography. But I took my opportunity on Saturday as the weather forecast was good and I got out of bed early enough to reach Leighton Moss RSPB reserve before 8am.

I followed the strategy described in my previous blog about Leighton Moss. I start  at the Eric Morecambe hide because it gets the best light first. I managed some shots of avocets feeding. The viewpoint of the hide is rather high, but this enhances the view of the reflections.

The islands in the scrape had lots of nests. I think most of the black-headed gulls were on eggs and I spotted an incubating oystercatcher too. A few of the avocets had hatched their chicks, but they were still quite small and too far away for decent pictures. I tried shooting the gulls and avocets mobbing a young herring gull; I got one shot of a black-headed gull hovering just over the herring gull’s head, but it was facing in the wrong direction. 

At the main reserve I got good views of a marsh harrier male hunting over the reeds as I walked across the causeway. I was even luckier when I reached the Lower hide, as I saw the male bring in prey and one the females came off her nest. I had never seen a food pass before, but I managed to get a distant shot as the female came for her meal.This shot and the next one are quite heavily cropped.

I wish I could say that this was the first shot of a sequence, but I lost focus on the birds so the other shots were useless. Distant shots of the birds against a fairly high contrast background were too tough a test for the autofocus of my Nikon D300s.

The female harrier returned to her nest to feed, the male cruised around for a while, before perching. There are currently 2 males and 6 females nesting at Leighton Moss, so each male is hunting for four: of course they will be even busier when the chicks hatch as the females cannot hunt until the chicks are large enough to be left on their own. However the male couldn’t rest for long, he had to soar up to chase a buzzard away. The birds were too high to be easy to photograph, but the dogfight was quite dramatic. Both birds have similar wingspans, but the harrier was much lighter and more manoeuvrable than the powerful buzzard, so it keep high, threatening to strike down, and forcing the buzzard to roll or turn to strike upwards. Actually I don’t think they touched, but they certainly came close.

I ended my visit at the Grisedale hide. There was a mad male lapwing trying to impress a female with wild display flights and lots of ‘peewit’ calls.  Fortunately he had a predictable flight pattern; the slow section was just after take-off from a boggy patch, so I prefocussed in front of it and managed an action shot.

Another marsh harrier came over, I think it was a young male showing the first traces of grey plumage. I don’t think it was one of the breeding birds, but it was hunting and it made a kill in the reeds after I had taken a few shots.

Why was it a halcyon day?

I have left the best until last: halcyon is the Greek name for the kingfisher. At the Allen hide, I was hoping that an avocet chick south of the hide would come close enough to photograph, but I noticed a kingfisher at the other end of the scrape. I was not surprised because I have had glimpses around the scrapes before and the pools and channels on the other side of the railway line behind the hides look like possible kingfisher habitat too.
The avocet chick decided to have a rest, so I went to the other end of the hide to watch the kingfisher fishing off the blue plastic posts of the electric fence around the scrape (which was installed to protect the avocets). When it came nearer to the end of the hide, I took a few photos, rather distant but better than I had managed before, then the bird suddenly dived for a fish. Fortunately for me, it missed. Then it flew towards the hide, perching on the fence post nearest to my window. I pushed the focus button and held my breath. It seemed to take several minutes before the image popped into focus in my viewfinder, but what I saw was breathtaking. The kingfisher was gleaming because it was directly down sun from my camera position. I took 47 photos in 43 seconds. Many of them are almost identical, but this is one of the best: the blue plastic post is not the most photogenic of perches - but I was just delighted by this little male.