There's always the risk of becoming repetitive with wildlife blogs, as entries reflect the seasons and highlight local activity. So once again this entry will feature the cormorant that's taken up residence at Falmer Pond, but hopefully the shots show a bit of variety. I'm going to start off though with a much smaller bird, the swallow.

Watching swallows as they sweep over water hunting insects can be mesmerizing, and trying to photograph them takes more patience (and time) than I can usually spare. Every now and then I give it a go, especially when they are out in number as they were today. Two shots (the second one is better, but the first one shows an open mouth which is a first for me with these sorts of images).

As for the cormorant, yesterday's images were mainly of it standing around on the bank of the pond. Today I managed to get some flight shots, or to be precise, the take-off sequence. There's not room for all of them here, so I've put a slightly longer sequence as a slideshow on my website in the 'Cormorant at Falmer' gallery. The images are also bit larger over there, so worth a visit (even if I do say so myself).
Starting up

Hop, step… hop, step…

Lift-off

And finally, one of the coromorant hanging out on the small island.


Camera note: all shots taken with the Canon 7D EF 400mm f/5.6L USM lens.