After two days of heavy cloud and looking constantly like 0600 hrs, Friday started a little brighter which was good, I was beginning to get photography withdrawal symptoms. I had popped out on Wednesday afternoon for the Goldeneye on the Scrape at Sandwich Bay but that's another story if I have time.
I sat in the relative warmth of the Scrape hide and with nothing much to point the camera at I started trying to take shots of Lapwing coming in to land on the island - without much success. I am happy to sing the praises of the Canon SX50 from the rooftops but it is not good for flight shots (nor in a couple of other situations but I don't want to dis it too much here!)
This was the best of the bunch. Even though I know how difficult it can be I was a little disappointed considering how many I took, <1% success rate!
There are nearly always plenty of duck, mostly Teal and Gadwall, on the Scrape and despite my best efforts to resist, I took some more shots of them - I'm not sure how many photos you have to take of something before you finally decide 'enough is enough'?
Male Gadwall
Male Teal
A small flock of Curlew (about 15 in all) flew around and I thought, hoped even, that they were going to land in front of the us but long before reaching the hide they flew off and landed somewhere out to the west of the Scrape. I took a few of shots and had slightly more success than I'd had with the lapwing - percentage wise. Still a long way short of what most of the people I follow on Flickr get with a DSLR and telephoto in terms of quality though. The Little grebe put in an appearance long enough for a few snaps.
I took a walk from the hide along to Dickson's Corner, the male Stonechat and some Meadow pipits were in the field with the gorse bushes and the Black redstart was still at the sailing club, and as uncooperative as ever. It is definitely camera shy, watched from a good distance it feeds happily among the boats and trailers, but point a camera at it and it soon seems to disappear. I did take a few shots but they were poor, this is also poor but about the best I've managed, from a few days ago.
I had to go to Deal to get some shopping so cruised slowly along Golf Road, I find the car a very useful hide and have had reasonable success photographing Curlew, Stock dove and Grey partridge along here from the car. The Curlew are usually very nervous and don't hang around long but today I spotted one that had ventured quite close to the road AND there was no traffic in either direction, so I pulled up slowly, opposite it, window down already and I managed to get a few shots before it decided it didn't like what I was doing and walked off.
This is probably the closest I've managed to get, the two images are resized to post them but essentially uncropped, just a little to centralise them.
There were also large numbers of Fieldfare here, feeding in the grass, and I've now convinced myself that situations like this are not well handled by the camera. I took a lot of really nice shots of the Fieldfare but on getting home and loading them on the computer they are nearly all out of focus. It appears that the camera struggles to focus on the subject when there is a lot of other material (grass in this case) all around - it looks sharp enough in the viewfinder but the results are very poor. This happened a few weeks ago with Lapwing in the same situation. I'll have to get lower so that the bird is showing above the background?
Fieldfare with worm - I saw quite a few catch worms which must say something about the worm population!
As for the Goldeneye - I'd seen the report on the SBBOT website, but it was such a grey overcast day I didn't think I'd get a photo, but after a bit of procrastination I took the camera out into the garden to see what light levels were like. ISO 800 gave me shutter speeds of 1/80 or at best 1/100 second, just about ok and with the light off the water....
I went to see it, just as I parked the car outside the Scrape someone in a microlight or to be more precise, a powered parachute, flew over my head and out behind the hide. The effect was more impressive than a circling squadron of Peregrine falcons, the sky was full of birds, including I'm guessing the Goldeneye. Roly, who had been in the hide, stuck his head out of the door to see what on earth had happened and, expletives deleted, said that the Goldeneye had been there but departed with everything else - as far as I'm aware it didn't come back. So for the sake of a few minutes deliberating with the camera in the garden I'd missed it.
Ahh well, that's birding for you.
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