Quick walk along the Coly

Yes, it's been nearly 2 months since my last blog post. The shortening days have left me with literally no opportunity to go out birding. Ahh the joys of leaving for work in the dark, and getting back in the dark 6 days a week, and other commitments filling time on the remaining day... So with a free hour of daylight today (yes, really, this was my first free hour in the daytime since September!!!) I went for a walk along the River Coly. Well, I say daylight, but it was already pretty gloomy by 15:00. There wasn't much to see with the most interesting birds being a probable Peregrine (80% sure as it was distant), a Grey Heron, a couple of Fieldfare and a Kingfisher. All pics were pretty shoddy but I'll put up a couple of the heron as it's been so long since I blogged.
To give you an idea of the lack of light (it was in a fairly sheltered area which didn't help my cause), I had to drop the camera to ISO 800 despite using a flash (high power at Guide No. 42 & +3 on exp. comp.) and the shutter speeds were still wallowing around the 1/100sec mark. Any fellow camera buff will appreciate how far from ideal this is considering that the camera/lens arrangement gives 672mm of umph (inc. 1.6x sensor crop factor of the 7D). Anyway, enough of the excuses:



I laid down on the ground to try and get an uncluttered background
 with this shot but couldn't quite get low enough



























Here are a few pics from September which I didn't have time to post at the time. Wheatear, Redshank and a Little Grebe; all in front of the Tower Hide:

Yum yum

A photogenic bird for a change!

Yum yum

I will try and keep posting but it will be infrequent. I may have to resort to posting some pics from this summers holiday to Austria which I didn't find time to do in July...