Tuesday 21 February 2017

WAXWINGS posing beautifully

I perhaps had more anticipation & excitement than most to see some Waxwings as I have been very 'late to the party' and these are the first I've seen! Patch birds are always more satisfying so the (optimistic) plan was for my first Waxwing sighting to be on patch but with Winter disappearing and the weather getting distinctly warmer I finally caved and went to see the Newton Abbot birds.

The location certainly felt a bit odd for a twitch and walking down a verge next to the A38 has a certain vulnerability to it! There are some barriers in place but if a vehicle crashed there and hit a birder it'd be almost certain death... I saw the birds 15 mins after arrival then tracked them to some trees where they were resting between periods of feeding and drinking. They were very vocal so keeping track of them was fairly easy despite the noise of the busy Devon Expressway. 11 Waxwings spent most of the time distantly up in trees but would occasionally fly down to the favoured feeding area in the central reservation and pose for some photos. They were a bit more flighty than I was expecting (having seen video footage of them sitting lazily) and they would feed for perhaps 5 - 10 seconds before flying back over the road and into trees. The weather wasn't on my side; there was dense cloud cover so the backgrounds in the pics are a boring grey rather than a nice blue. Still, patience paid off eventually and I managed a few pics that I'm happy with.

*Gav has asked about the pic with two birds being the same bird copied twice which is partly correct in that some of the left bird had parts borrowed from another pic so that I could remove an obscuring branch in the foreground. He is right that I should have perhaps mentioned it so my apologies if anyone felt uneasy about that.




6 comments:

  1. These are splendid, the detail is amazing. The best photos of waxies I have seen yet. Tim, you're a star!

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    1. Many many thanks Steph! You're too kind! :-)

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  2. Lovely pics. You mention on Twitter about the cloudy sky making your images look like a painting. I found when I went to process mine taken at Turnford, a first for me too, that they looked a bit painterly and I thought that I might have missed the focus. Having read a bit I now think that it is their very silky plumage that gives the effect. Evidently their scientific name means 'silk tail'. I'm not a birder just an enthusiastic amateur, not very technical, photographer. :) I dodged death like you on a bridge over the A10 to get my pics. MsQuizzical

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    1. Many thanks! Yes I agree the silky plumage gives a slightly softer finish than you'd expect with other birds. Part of the reason it looks soft on mine is because they weren't particularly close so the pic has been cropped in quite a bit, I kinda like the effect though. Haha yes they do turn up in some strange places! Thanks for visiting my page :)

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  3. They are wonderful pictures, I too have been waiting to see my very first Waxings, but dipped on them when they showed up not far from home while I was at work.

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    1. Many thanks Martin! Ahh that's a shame; hopefully you get a chance to see them soon. They're certainly worth the wait!

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