A Garden Bonanza

Mostly a garden update this one. All this snow and slipping down in the street has seemed worth it with the feathered visitors we've been getting. The Fieldfare has taken up residency for now, and the very wee cotoneaster and pyracantha we planted in the front garden last year have scored us a Redwing or two. The growing Reed Bunting attendance has peaked with around 15 birds at a time, and I pause to type here because a Mistle Thrush just landed on the lawn, it's squabbling with the Blackbirds over an apple core.
Extra bit of excitement came last night when closing the curtains in our spare room I noticed a shape in our heavily prune cherry tree. Twas a Tawny Owl, probably looking for the mice and voles that hoover up the seed spill from the day's action on our front garden feeders. The bird stayed a minute or two, even looked through the window at me. In the end it swooped into the gloom of our back garden, just magical. Makes species #45 on the garden list since moving in almost a year ago.

Final mention goes to the Weasel I saw darting around our patio the other day - another new record for our garden.

Looks like the thaw will set in for a couple of days now, expect we'll be back to normal by the time of the RSPB's Big Garden Birdwatch.

As the water is still frozen there's not been much up at the pit lately. The best I can report is a Great Black-backed Gull as an overfly down in the village the other day.

In other news, recent findings suggest that Grey Squirrel impacts on woodland bird populations far less than previously feared, although locally they could be bad news for scarcer species like Hawfinch, so we can almost like them again.
The perfect excuse to add a few squirrel pictures to the thumbnails of my recent photographs below...

Relishing Rutland

Golden Plover below Hambleton Hall

Yesterday the girlfriend went down south on business again, giving me chance to get dropped off at Rutland Water and picked up again at the end of the day. Always worth a visit, I didn't find any of the rarer grebes from last time, but I did bag a new lifer, a Goshawk (#203).

The raptor was distant enough to make a glimpse through binoculars suggest Buzzard on size alone, no doubting a Goshawk though when I located it on the scope. Certainly big, all pale below, long in the tail, with fairly broad-tipped wings of not the hugest span (ruling out Peregrine as a contender). Finally some strong slow wingbeats confirmed it was a bird of substance, not an unusually big looked Sparrowhawk - which are much more prone to a weak flapping action when they soar.
Alas, a quick glance around the hide showed only novice birders with no scopes, so I concentrated on confirming ID for myself rather than spreading the news and the Goshawk, always faraway, soon sailed off into the distance over the Hambleton peninsula. Ultimately the find was a bit like the difference between a Carrion Crow and Raven; for all the smaller crows or hawks you check, you just know almost instantly when you've finally found the bigger, more impressive bird.

Not so sure Goshawk are much of a fixture at Rutland, but the great mix of habitat shouldn't make it too surprising I would suppose, especially at this time of the year when some of the birds spread to more open country.
Anyway, I'm chuffed - an unforeseen lifer!

Elsewhere around the reserve it was very quiet for a Sunday and I had many hides all to myself. That way I could sit silently and patiently and got some terrific views of Kingfisher and Water Rail, and in one a Wren sat on the ledge next to me. One of those seldom occasions you find a tick inside the hide. It sure cursed at me too. I was alone but I still smiled, I still laughed to myself, that's what birds can do to you. They're all a gift, a pleasure so often coming with the unexpected and this feisty wee Wren being no different.

I haven't posted a day list for a long time so here's the score for yesterday:

1. Barn Owl (heard)
2. Blackbird
3. Black-headed Gull
4. Blue Tit
5. Bullfinch
6. Canada Goose
7. Carrion Crow
8. Chaffinch
9. Collared Dove
10. Common Gull
11. Coot
12. Cormorant
13. Dunnock
14. Egyptian Goose (2)
15. Fieldfare (c.50)
16. Gadwall
17. Goldcrest
18. Golden Plover
19. Goldeneye (c.20 my first of the season)
20. Goldfinch
21. Goshawk (briefly circled high over the peninsula)
22. Great Crested Grebe
23. Great Tit
24. Green Sandpiper (5+)
25. Green Woodpecker
26. Greenfinch
27. Grey Heron
28. Greylag Goose
29. Herring Gull
30. House Sparrow
31. Jackdaw
32. Jay
33. Kestrel
34. Kingfisher
35. Lapwing
36. Lesser Black-backed Gull
37. Linnet
38. Little Egret
39. Little Grebe
40. Little Stint (2)
41. Long-tailed Tit
42. Magpie
43. Mallard
44. Meadow Pipit
45. Mistle Thrush
46. Moorhen
47. Mute Swan
48. Pheasant
49. Pied Wagtail
50. Pintail
51. Pochard
52. Redshank
53. Redwing
54. Reed Bunting
55. Robin
56. Rook
57. Ruddy Duck
58. Ruff
59. Shoveler
60. Snipe
61. Sparrowhawk
62. Starling
63. Stock Dove
64. Stonechat (at least 6)
65. Tawny Owl (heard being mobbed by crows at 18:30)
66. Teal
67. Tree Sparrow
68. Treecreeper
69. Tufted Duck
70. Water Rail (good views of 3 from quiet hides nobody else stopped to look from)
71. Wigeon
72. Woodpigeon
73. Wren (one of which flew inside the Harrier Hide)

The sort of list that describes the broad variety of habitats they have at Rutland Water.

The girlfriend was late in picking me up, one whole hour late actually, so I was stranded in the dark for a while. No complaints from me as along the path I found a Tawny Owl getting grief from a pair of crows, and the tell tale shrieking of a Barn Owl.

Some pictures from the day:

Kingfisher

Green Sandpiper

Ruff

Pintail

Stonechat

Fieldfare

(All taken through my 8x42s.)

You know, you could do a lot worse than spend a whole day watching birds.

In other news, my mobile phone has given out on me after a noble effort lasting almost 10 years, and I just whacked in a new ink cartridge in my printer. Why do I mention this? The RSPB are still collecting both for recycling/fundraising - the weblink - be sure to keep it in mind.

Somebody asked about my photography

Generally I use a FujiFilm Finepix S5000, the important specs of which are 10x optical zoom and 6-megapixel image quality. Those are about as large as you'll get for an automatic digital camera short of much more expensive digital-SLRs (those with interchangeable lens and full manual controls). I bought mine over a year ago second hand from a guy I knew, at the time the only way I could have afforded it, nowadays similar cameras seem to be selling for around the £300 mark.
Importantly it has almost full manual features with aperture and shutterspeed priorities as well a few other options, from video capture and black and white settings. For the most part it's still an automatic focus camera and this can be a drawback when you're trying to photograph birds, particularly when foliage is involved. Unfortunately that's something you just have to learn to live with unless you're willing to shell out upward of £600 for a digital-SLR, though there are little tricks you can learn to try and cope with automatic focus.

For presentation on the internet I generally reduce the size of my pictures, this increases their sharpness and just makes for a better looking picture. That's not necessary for printing when usually the size you print at will give a decent quality result from the picture.

Macro lens is a superb feature that's pretty standard for most digital cameras these days, basically it lets you take super close-ups, very handy for pictures of flowers, insects and so forth.


When snapping birds I almost always choose to set my aperture as wide as possible, normally F 2.8 to F 4.0. This means the subject you focus on will be sharp but the background and foreground will soon blur, it really helps to draw the subject of the shot out, in this case a Robin. Also such a wide aperture will give a quick shutterspeed that in cases of dimmer light can really help prevent potential camera shake.

At longer range, over 50 yards in this Stonechat picture, 10x magnification just isn't enough for a normal portrait of the bird so you have to be creative and instead compose the shot to photograph the bird in its setting instead.

Prior to the S5000, I used FujiFilm's Finepix 2800, only 6x optical lens, 2.1-megapixel and very few manual controls beyond flash and macro lens, it's little more than an automatic camera with a big lens, rather affordable though. Still with a little practice and luck some acceptable shots still came…

These were all about opportunity taken with what by today's standards are fairly low-range cameras. If you just get out there with a digital camera that lets you take 200 shots or more in an afternoon, sooner or later you'll be wowing yourself.

That's all, a very brief summary, and I'm by no means a professional or an expert, this is just amateur experience talking, but I hope it helps.

Hello!

Welcome to my new birding blog.

My name is James, I live in the East Midlands (of England) and enjoy spending many a weekend on the trail for birds, my trusty, if very modest, camera in tow. For the first several days or weeks here I'll be transferring posts from my previous blogging site so expect dates and seasons to be much of a mixture for a while. The likelihood is I shall probably retro-update so it might be worth looking backwards at earlier dates.

I hope you'll enjoy visiting my blog and be inspired to go out and find some feathered friends of your own.

Cross your fingers and I might just manage to keep updated!