Winter Wanderings

This has probably been one of the worst winters to date for photography that I can remember. A constant stream of storms and wet weather have rolled in on the Atlantic 'conveyor belt' and an unusual jet stream alignment has resulted in unseasonably warm temperatures. Some trees are even in blossom in December! Many places just a short distance to the north of here have suffered the brunt of this weather and my thoughts go out to those communities who have been subject to repeated flooding which must be a dreadful experience.

I don't mind photographing wildlife in bad weather as it can produce some very atmospheric images but there needs to be some light and that is where this winter has really failed. There has been a almost constant presence of thick grey cloud above. The few moments of brightness seem to have coincided with when I have been otherwise occupied. I have managed a couple of moments to coordinate having the camera in hand with those rare moments when the sun has broke through and thought I would share a few photos from these sessions with you.

The first of these are from my long running corvid flight project. Being close to home it means I can respond quickly to getting there when the sun appears. The low winter sun means that there is a very limited window of light at the location, due to long shadows cast by trees. Always fun to photograph these birds. The challenge with the magpies is to try and catch the back view of the tail in the right light such that it shows off the full rainbow range of colours. The photographs below are a small selection taken from this project since September.

The jay are as difficult as ever with their erratic flight, particularly as these birds come in to land.

I have a couple of marine lakes close to home on the Wirral. The most reliable for turning up an interesting bird is the large lake at West Kirby on the north-west corner of the peninsula. It has been a few years since a Great Northern Diver took up temporary residence on the lake and this winter saw a juvenile bird arrive. A brief moment of sun saw me out next to the lake which is always a challenge for photography merely as a result of its large size. It was good to catch up with this young diver having spent some time with the adults in Iceland this year. After some patient waiting and moving while the bird was submerged, I was eventually rewarded with a close encounter and just in time before the sun disappeared below a bank of clouds gathering over the hills in North Wales.

The very last rays of the day.

Of course you always get a few extras along the way including a group of Redshank at first light and a Little Egret whilst waiting for the final species of this post, the Short-eared Owl.

This winter has seen a big influx of Short-eared owls into the UK. I assume this is a reflection of a poor year for voles, their main prey, or very successful breeding year in Europe. Its always a pleasure to photograph these daylight hunting owls and watching them quarter the fields in search of prey. They usually stay until around March when they start heading back up to high altitudes to breed. So hopefully if the weather is kind there is still plenty of time to photograph them in the New Year.

This will be my last blog post for this year. Thanks for all your support through 2015  and I will wish you all a Happy, Healthy and Wildlife filled 2016.

Romania and the Last Frontier - Day 3 p.m: Golden Glow

A good day was about to get a whole lot better! so expect a good number of photographs below. After the midday break which included fishing around in the vat of soup on the dining table trying to avoid the bits of carp, downloading cards and backing up and a quick siesta, we were assembled on the jetty at 3.pm ready for the afternoon session.

First stop for the afternoon was going to be some Kingfishers. We had tried this spot the previous year with no sign of the birds but I think we had missed them due to our later trip. The strong current pushing down this channel made positioning the boat upstream and into the margin difficult. This was especially the case as the boat need to be perpendicular to the flow. After about 15 minutes the boat was in position and this was the scene before us.

On the left side of the image you can just see the vertical clay bank where the Kingfishers were nesting. After about 20 minutes the male appear with a fish and landed on the perch. With nice even light from some thin cloud overhead, and the dark green swirling waters providing a back drop, the colours of these birds appeared incredibly vivid. A flash of brilliance in this watery landscape. The bird flew into the nest before re-emerging a short while later and disappearing downstream in a flash of electric blue accompanied by the characteristic high pitched penetrating call. Apologies for the background on these photos which have suffered greatly  at the hands of jpeg compression but do look great on the originals.

Another 30 minutes or so past and the female appeared, distinguished by the red on the lower bill, also carrying a small fish.

The boat swung round due to the force of the current and needed to be re-positioned. Having photographed both birds on the perch I was thinking what else I could do. Typically the birds were landing, moving along the perch and then launching straight into the bank. I thought I might try a flight photo although this was not an easy proposition from a the moving platform of the boat that was gently rocking and yawing in the strong flow. Also probably not a very sensible idea given the light limitations, as you need to lot of camera shutter speed to freeze these small fast moving birds. I kept one photo from these attempts.

In total we spent a couple of hours at the Kingfisher site before we all agreed it was time to move on. As we traveled through the back channels to our next destination, the thin cloud dispersed and the sinking sun broke through. We came out into a very large lake, which I call 'Ibis lake', as we had managed to photograph some of these birds there the previous year. As the boat glided into the lake, to our left was a large area of floating weed that extended out from the the high reed fringed egde. Dotted across this mass of floating vegetation were numerous Squacco and Night Herons, a Little Egret and a couple of Glossy Ibis. With a lack of clouds in the sky this whole area would become beautifully lit in golden light as the sun dropped away.

I thought for this part I would post the images by species rather than in any chronological order as to be honest the whole session is a bit of a blur of birds and the sound of whirring camera shutters. At one point we had a Glossy Ibis, Night Heron, and Squacco Heron in a line in front of us and I was sequential going down the line up taking images. An amazing experience to have these photogenic species in front of you with the light improving with each passing moment. Of course the whole process was accompanied by the constant background chorus of frogs just to add the vibrant atmosphere.

I will start with the Glossy Ibis. We managed to photograph this bird the previous year in some fairly poor light. To really appreciate the beautiful colours of these birds they need some sun on them and this particular bird was in superb plumage. A wonderful combination of deep rusty red with a green and bronze metallic sheen across the wings that changed hue with the direction of light. The further the sun fell the more the colours sang out. The bird was striding across the vegetation which it was constantly probing with its curved beak and occasionally pausing to snap up an aquatic morsel. A small selection of photographs are below.

Occasionally a Hooded Crow would drop in amongst the feeding birds.These corvids seemingly perfectly happy in the water.

Next species was the Little Egret, a familiar species that has become increasingly common since the early 1990's  throughout the UK. However, what a treat it was to have one in such a great setting and light. The bird was showing the typical hyperactive traits of this species, striding around on top of the vegetation looking for food and generally harassing the diminutive Squacco herons. At one point the fish successfully captured a goby (embarrassingly as a trained fish scientist I am unable to tell you which species as thereare several that inhabit the diverse fish community of the delta).

When not feeding the Egret was making life difficult for the numerous Squacco Herons.

If there was ever a bird ideally suited for photography in golden evening light it has to be the Squacco Heron. The golden tones of their feathers really glow and softens the glare off their bright white wings. A range of activities were photographed including stalking prey, and fluttering across the weed having spotted a prey item at distance and shaking out those long feathers.

To finish off this incredible session, the Night Heron. I started off the session with a couple of flight photos as the birds moved in to their evening feeding area.

Typically these birds stand motionless for long periods before a small movement in the floating plants ahead falls under the stare of those large penetrating red eyes. The birds are then spurred into rapid action.

We were fortunate to witness the whole hunt of a frog from capture, to subduing the large meal to it finally disappearing from sight. A couple of photographs from this event are below.

We pulled up alongside a  Pygmy Cormorant was also glowing in the last of the days sun....

......and finished off the session with a Night Heron in the remainder of the light which was now taking on some pink hues

I felt quite drained after such an intense session and with some beaming photographer on the boat,  it was time to fire up the outboard and head back to the hotel for some catfish and tomatoes stew....oh great. Here is a short video clip of us leaving this area just to give you a feel for the number of birds we had in front of us.


Evening on the Delta from Richard Steel on Vimeo.

This had probably been my favourite session on the Danube Delta to date and one that will remaining in the memory, albeit slightly blurry by it intensity, for a very long time to come. I was already looking forward and wondering what the next day might bring.

Roaming in Romania - Day 4: Last Delta Evening

Firstly apologies for the delay in posting but there were a lot of photographs to sort through from this very productive session.

Following the afternoon siesta, the four photographers gathered on the jetty awaiting arrival of the hide boat for our last evening session on the Delta.  As we waited around 20 white pelicans flew lazily upstream to settle in an area off the main channel around 300m away. This would be our first stop off point for the afternoon session. As we stopped and manoeuvred into position I took the opportunity to take a photograph of a Caspian Gull perched nearby and a Common Tern bathing.

The area where the birds had landed was very shallow and even involved Zoltan getting out the boat at one point and pushing it to get us closer into the birds. The Pelicans put on a superb display for us over the next two hours with co-operative feeding , preening and eventually flying off to their next destination. It was both fascinating and a pleasure to watch the feeding behaviour as the birds corralled fish before plunging in together with the hug beaks to scoop up the tightly packed shoals.  A small selection of images from those very memorable two hour are below.

A moment in the feeding frenzy

A quiet spell after feeding

 Wings of an 'angel'.

The pelican is a very heavy bird to get airborne.

We departed with the birds, and only travelled a short distance further upstream, and still within view of our hotel on the island, when we came across our first Little Egret and Glossy Ibis. I was surprised by the apparently low numbers of egrets in the Delta.

The Glossy Ibis, a first for me, was such a beautiful bird that was glowing with metallic green and purple hues off its wings in the slowly descending sun.

We headed onwards in the boat and our destination for the rest of the session was to be the huge lake, where the previous evening we had seen large numbers of Squacco and Night Heron gathering towards dusk and hunting among the lilies.

Predictably it was one of the numerous Squacco Heron that we encountered first as it picked it way gracefully amongst the lilies.

As the light started to soften and reduce the Night Herons became more active allowing us the first opportunities for some flight photographs of these compact birds.

The quality of light was becoming better and better and we managed to get some of the best Night Heron portraits of the trip before the sun temporarily disappeared behind a bank of cloud.

We continued our journey across to the edge of the lake where half a dozen of the usually very nervous Glossy Ibis were oblivious our presence as the busily fed amongst the Lilies. It was a shame we had lost the sun while we were with these birds as they were being very active. There really wasnot enough light to produce sufficient shutter speed as thye jumped and delicately fluttered between floating vegetation.

Next bird in front of the lens was a juvenile Night Heron that was waiting patiently for its next unsuspecting meal to swim past.

The sun briefly reappeared between the low cloud and the horizon offering the last glimmer of sunlight for the day the was used on photographing some more Squacco Heron that were still busy reducing the abundance of frogs in the Delta.

I do not think I have put some many photographs in a blog post before which is just a reflection of how productive the Delta can be for the bird photographer.

Overall it had been a very special day in the Delta and as the sun set, and the watery landscape took on a golden glow, the small boat transporting some smiling photographers slowly made its way back through the weed choked channels to our hotel at Mila 23.

We would have one last session on the Delta the following morning before we headed to the next phase of journey, the Macin mountains. It was agreed that in the morning we would return to the first small lake where we started our Delta sessions to try and capture some more Black-necked Grebes, and of course any other birds we might happen across on our travels, in the soft dawn light.