I must confess I haven't paid much attention to this blog lately. Well, I'm back!
I posted a picture on 365 blog in the Summer of a family of moorhens with a caption "look out for hungry seagulls" little realising that soon there would only be two chicks.
A later picture was of a gull with a beak full of catch - which I thought was a water vole. But when I really looked at the photo, it was very clearly a small black bird. I'm sure it was one of the moorhen chicks. I only ever saw two in the family after that, and now they've all fled the nest.
But birdwatching (and photography!) isn't all pretty sights. As they say, "Mother Nature, red in tooth and claw." Because birds do have a life apart from posing for twitchers. Another photo, taken more recently, although at a distance and not of the best quality, shows a herring gull with a fish for a meal. The fish was alive when the gull started on it, and it caught my attention because it was putting up a show of resistance, albeit futile!
There have been some little egrets wintering in the river, and I have tried to get a photo of an egret catching fish. But nothing large unfortunately.
Some of the feeding rituals are interesting. Redshanks will pull something from the mud and then carry it either to the shoreline or to a pool and dunk it in the water. I guess this is to clean off any mud. The little egret held the fish for a few seconds before manoeuvring enough to swallow. But the herring gull (above) wasn't so dainty with the fish. It shook it around until it had stopped flapping, then slapped it onto the mud and ripped it to bits.
On a technical note, these photos were taken with a Canon SX70 HS bridge camera which has a decent telephoto lens. Action shots like these can only really be taken with a burst setting and a lot of luck. I don't see how they could be achieved with film and development. This is a clear advantage of DSLR photography.
