Pittswood Birds

Heavy rain this morning meant no early patch visit was made today and with a few errands to run this afternoon I was limited to a 90 minute late morning visit, which I spent at the Greenhouse Grounds.

I was hoping the rain may have brought down some sheltering passage birds, but there was actually less seen than on recent visits. Only 2 WHITETHROATS, a CHIFFCHAFF and a WILLOW WARBLER were present, along with the regular WRENS, DUNNOCKS, ROBINS, CHAFFINCH, GREENFINCH, BLUE and GREAT TITS, PIED WAGTAILS, BLACKBIRDS, SONGTHRUSHES and the mass of SWALLOWS on the Greenhouses.

Frequent scans of the sky were made, one such scan produced a PEREGRINE, another a KESTREL, but very little else was seen going over, just the 100 or so GREYLAG GEESE with a few CANADA GEESE, a couple of HERRING GULLS and a BLACK HEADED GULL.

The event of the morning didn't involve a bird, it happened when I spied a Brown Hawker Dragonfly patrolling its territory, as I watched, I saw it take a Ladybird from the sky, then fly down to alight on a thistle to devour it. I stealthily made my way over to it, thinking that it would fly off as soon as it caught a glimpse of me, as they normally do! However, this one sat tight and I was able to get right up to it..........unfortunately I didn't have my Macro lens! Bloody typical!  I had the 400mm prime lens on the camera, which has a minimum focus distance of 3.5 meters, useless for close up work!

I did what I could with it, but was really fed up with myself, as the Brown Hawker even allowed me to move some of the vegetation from in front of it and when I did get too confident it only flew as far as a nearby dock plant, giving more potentially great photo opportunities  ;-( Anyway, I got a few images, I'm surprised they are as good as they are, as trying to hold the heavy unstablished 400mm prime lens steady was all but impossible, they aren't the worst images, but the macro lens would have given me some great shots.

Ive had to crop the image right down to get this close up, never a good idea for decent images, I could have got this as a full frame image with the Macro lens, you can even see the Ladybird in its Jaws.....sob...sob....

Brown Hawker - Shame about that thistle head too!