Kingfishers, best day yet!!

Today was my first COMPLETELY free day to do whatever I like since October 2010, so I thought there was no better way to spend it than down by the River Coly. I headed out early in the morning and got a few shots of the female Kingfisher. After this success with the female bird, I headed home for some lunch. This Buzzard is the only other semi-acceptable photo I took in the morning:

Nice bird! They're doing well in the Coly area.

So after some lunch, I headed back down to the Kingfishers, this time with the sun shining nicely on their main perching branch, downstream of the nest site. This extra light helped immensely with the photography side of things. Here is some photo technical details for those of you who are interested.

Male bird (pic shown below) taken at:
300mm
1/640 sec
f/5.6
ISO 100

So here's a shot of the male.

This is cropped.



Love these birds, (you can probably tell by now...) simply stunning.

Kingfishers

Same as yesterday, I headed out briefly after work and was again rewarded.



Definitely worth clicking on this one to enlarge it.

Something that no-one ever likes to see...

Firstly I'll apologise for not posting since January. This isn't through lack of desire, it's through lack of time!
I managed to take a few pics in a couple of free hours last weekend. Nothing interesting but better than nothing!
On a sad note, the pictures of the Sparrowhawk which are to follow are of an injured bird. I didn't get too close with the camera as I didn't want to terrorise the bird. Although a dog owner was letting her mutt do a good job of this as it was barking visciously at it... Thankfully not for too long!! The bird was caught and taken to the vets in Axminster (thanks to Allison Stenning) but it sounds as though it was going to be put down. It's left wing was broken. No other obvious damage though.

Sorry about the feeder shots, I was desparate!

(Black Redstart- Seaton Hole)

Colyton birding (nothing special)

Seeing as though I had some free time and it was actually sunny today, I headed out with a camera to see what I could find in the way of wildlife. Unfortunately this was a fairly boring and fruitless exercise... Here are a few of todays pics, mostly boring subjects I'm afraid (the exception being a Goldcrest which proved even more timid than usual, apart from when it landed about 50cm away which was too close for the lens to focus..... GRR!!!!!!!). 

You know a desparate photographer when you see one photographing common birds like these...

Follow on...

After some mild success yesterday I headed out again after the patch Goldcrest. As with yesterday, conditions were dark and overcast (this was at 16:30!!) but a powerful flashgun managed to compensate enough to get some pics that aren't too offensively bad. There was also an uncharacteristically obliging Song Thrush there. Here are a few of todays shots:



The sky wasn't actually blue!! The flash just made it look like this.



Colyton birding (brief!!)

I had an unexpected hour to spare this afternoon so I headed out around Colyton with my camera gear. As per usual the weather was unfavourable. Cloudy, cold, dark and generally awful conditions for photography! I walked towards an area near the playing fields after receiving a tip off that a goldcrest was frequently present there (thanks Helga). Despite not being particularly rare I'd still only ever seen two of these birds before this one in my lifetime!!! So regardless of the weather I was pleased that a goldcrest turned up after about 20 minutes of waiting. Here are a few snaps that I managed to take. I apologise for poor image quality, conditions were bad and the bird never stayed still for more than half a second or so!! And it insisted on hiding behind vegetation. There are a couple of pics of other species too, all photographed in the same area:

Black Redstart

Having seen Karen's post about there being a Black Redstart at Seaton Hole, I thought I'd go and have a look. It only took about 5 minutes or so for the bird to show but it only landed on the rocks for a second or two before dropping down between them and out of sight! Highly frustrating as this rarely even gave me time to focus my camera on the thing! I did eventually manage to get a few shots. Please excuse the appauling image quality, it was raining as well as being dark.