A visiting Glossy Ibis at Slimbridge

Last night my laptop stopped working, and wouldn’t charge the battery. I’ve known there was a battery issue arising for a little while, but hadn’t expected such an event. I decided to book in to the Bristol Cribbs Causeway Apple Store’s repair centre and was delighted to get a reservation for midday today.

I arrived on time and had help from a good man, who tested the machine and found no other faults than the need for a a new battery, which is admittedly four years old. It turns out that there is a way to reboot the battery’s management system which once done has got it working. A replacement requires the computer to be sent away for between seven and ten days, so I need to do a large print run for my stall and prepare for cold turkey from computer use. But I came away with a lot of good advice on various ways forward, particularly regarding upgrading the operating system, which has been rather stuck in the past as I need to use old software (Lightroom) which can’t be upgraded. It means I must move over to CaptureOne, which I own but am finding hard to move over to completely, particularly for all my printing needs. Yikes.

As a ‘cloud’ had been lifted I decided I’d drive home from Bristol via the A38 and go to the outskirts of the Wetland Trust at Slimbridge to look for the visiting rare Glossy Ibis which I’d yet to see, despite it having been happily feeding on the meadows next to the canal. I parked in the village and walked over the canal swing-bridge. Previously I’d found hordes of cars parked there on the narrow road leading to WWT Slimbridge and a lot of photographers with massive zooms fighting for position to view the Ibis.

Today I saw two cameras pointing into the field through a farm gate. As I approached them they smiled and said it was close by. In fact it less than ten yards away behind a wire fence happily digging its long beak into the wet ground where puddles and lush grass abounded. I pointed my lens through the bars of the gate and was delighted.

I spent about an hour there waiting for the scudding dark clouds to pass and let the occasional shafts of sunlight to illuminate the scene. The Ibis gently wandered about completely unfazed by the couple of photographers and stayed close by us as it fed on different parts of the field, some puddles and a shallow pond. Eventually it stood looking at us preening itself then lifted one leg up and slowly turned its neck around and tucked it head into it feathers and went to sleep. Taker a look at the ‘Extras’. I could have posted at least twenty different shots of the lovely Ibis. I don’t know where it is from but it is one of the benefits of climate warming that it has left its usual eastern European wintering sites (I think that is where it is from) to visit us.