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.

Leighton Moss

A nice day's birdwatching, but no rarities

28th February 2013

 

Leighton Moss is an RSPB reserve famous for marsh harriers, bitterns, bearded tits and otters. I didn’t see any of them on the 28th of February, but the light was good and I had a productive day.

I always start my visits at the Morecambe Bay hides, which are little way from the main reserve, because they have the best light early in the morning. Unfortunately there weren’t many birds on the pools. I did get nice views of a charm of goldfinches feeding in alders beside the path and of a crow posed in a hawthorn tree. I tried to photograph both: the dappled light in the alders didn’t work, but the crow was down sun and I liked the colours of the lichens and twisted twiggy branches.

Crows don’t attract much attention from birdwatchers and they often get a bad press, but I admire their agility in flight, their adaptability and their intelligence.

The main part of the reserve is the largest reedbed in northern England. There is a public footpath on a causeway across the reeds and the Public hide looks north from the middle of causeway, but there was little in view when I looked in. At the end of the causeway there is a path for RSPB members leading north to the Lower hide. This path runs along the edge of the reserve, between a strip of woodland beside the reeds and rough pastures. A pair of song thrushes was searching the grassland. I had to wait for them to come close to the fence, and to choose poses where tufts of grass didn’t spoil the view and the angle of the light did not create awkward shadows (although I did a little dodging in Photoshop on the second image below). I couldn’t do anything about the way that the thrushes’ activities caused damp bits of grass to stick to their heads and beaks.

At the Lower hide, the most prominent birds were some teal resting at the edge of the water just in front of the hide. Most of them swam off eventually, but a few started dabbling in the marshy ground. One drake came very close to the hide, so I got a few shots – focus was tricky and the colours on the drake’s head changed with every movement, but I like this one.

Snipe are tricky birds to photograph. They live among clumps of sedge and grass, which always seem to be in the way; they can freeze, immediately becoming almost invisible and when they do move, they can be jerky and unpredictable making panning and focus difficult. There were about eight feeding close to Lilian’s hide when I arrived there after lunch, but I got rather frustrated by them. Fortunately one of them decided to be even less predictable by going for a swim, which I had never seen before. In retrospect, I wish I had set a slightly faster shutter speed, but I was pleased to get an adequate shot.

On the path through the woods towards the Griesdale hide I spotted a brambling in company with a few chaffinches. I knew I couldn’t get a proper photograph in the thicket, but I wanted a record shot. There has been some discussion on The Online Photographer blog* about record shots. For me a record shot is a shot taken simply as a record of something I have seen. Sometimes it’s the first step to a better photo, if you can wait or move or find another way to improve on it, but sometimes you just have to be satisfied with a record. Just to illustrate what I mean, here is one of these shots of the brambling – it has just been cropped to the same proportions and reduced to the same size as the others and converted to jpg format without any other processing. 

This photo wins no points for technical merit or artistic impression; but it clearly records a brambling.

The day ended in frustration, as I spent a long time watching a group of red deer stags in the distance from the Tim Jackson hide. Most had shed their antlers, but the biggest stag still had a fine set, however he sat in the reeds and only stood up when he was behind two others. I got no decent photos of them.

* Highly Recommended
a thoughtful blog about the artistic side of photography http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com