Jenny Wren

February 4, 2015 by Words | 2 Comments

Her real name of course is the much earthier Troglodytes troglodytes, and she is the UK’s commonest breeding bird. Her tiny size, and preference for shaded corners and thick undergrowth, means that despite being so common she is relatively difficult to see; at least, that is, unless you look for her.

I took this sequence in the churchyard of St Laurence Church, adjacent to the pond at Falmer. She was hopping long the flint wall, occasionally diving down to peck at spider webs (see second and fourth shots).

Wren on a flint wall

Wren on a flint wall

Wren on a flint wall

Wren on a flint wall

Wren on a flint wall

Wren on a flint wall

A pretty little thing, and one of my best sequences of a wren. Even the light was good.

Camera note: all photos taken with the Canon 7D Mark II and EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens.

Posted in Birds Tagged |

Great Spot

February 3, 2015 by Words | 10 Comments

I’m more pleased than usual to be blogging tonight, not just because of the subject matter. Yesterday I was modifying some of the background settings and managed to do two things. First I locked myself out of the site. Completely. No way to log in, just a dead page and an error code. Then in attempting to sort that out, I knocked the site over completely. 🙁

Thankfully everything of importance is backed up, so the panic levels were no more than moderate. I had another look this morning and was able to get the basic site back up (I’d installed an old system file which needed a minor edit to remove a deprecated command). The lesson here is that error codes are really useful things if you bother to read them! It gave me the file and line that was causing the problem. A quick edit sorted it. Tonight I updated a second corrupted file. And Eureka! I was back in business.

So much for that. I really wasn’t looking forward to re-building from scratch.

The second reason for wanting to blog today is that I caught a glimpse of our local great spotted woodpecker. It lives at the edge of the car park at work, and is just beginning to get active. I’ve previously photographed its chicks, and with luck I’ll be able to do the same over the coming weeks/months. These shots are the female, but I’m sure her mate is around.

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Great Spotted Woodpecker

Great Spotted Woodpecker

So all told a good day. A working website and a great spotted woodpecker. I can relax again.

Camera note: all photos taken with the Canon 7D Mark II and EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens.

Posted in Wildlife

Animals Being Active

January 30, 2015 by Words | 4 Comments

No great theme today, and indeed I’ll start with a photo taken on Thursday at Falmer Pond. A number of people were out feeding the gulls (a mix of herring gulls and black-headed gulls), and the inevitable feeding frenzy followed. I decided to go for motion blur shots this time, despite the quite reasonable light. They were taken at between 1/13 and 1/15s at f/18 (I needed the small aperture to get the shutter speed down).

Motion blur gulls at Falmer

Motion blur gulls at Falmer

Sticking with motion blur, I photographed this little rat in mid shake. The shutter is around 1/125 which is fine when they keep still. I like it though. It had just jumped up on to the branch after a quick swim across the corner of the pond.

rat shaking itself dry

Rat shaking itself dry

Rat swimming

Rat swimming

The robins (who seem to share the same corner of the pond as the rats) were active again. I caught this little bird stretching its wing.

Robin stretching its wing

Robin stretching its wing

The last trio of photos were a chance sighting of a dog out in a local field. That’s not unusual in itself, but I’ve not previously seen one having this much fun playing with a broom!

Dog playing with broom

Dog playing with broom

Dog playing with broom

It seems there was a theme after all. Not planned, but there you go. Sometimes these things just fall into place.

Camera note: all photos taken with the Canon 7D Mark II and EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS II USM lens.

Posted in Birds, dog, rats, Wildlife Tagged , , , , |