Tumbling

I spent a thoroughly enjoyable few hours at Slimbridge today. It was bitterly cold, and the light was patchy, but the birding was all you could reasonably wish for.

Pick of the day, rarity-wise, was a Scaup - but it was a rather scruffy first-winter bird that spent most of the time I was watching it asleep, so I wouldn't describe it as photogenic. Far better in photographic terms were the flocks of waders on Tack Piece, which spent much of the morning being put to flight by raptors, and providing great opportunities for the assembled bank of cameras in the Robbie Garnett hide. In order to get anywhere near the window, I had to insinuate myself with some determination between a couple of blokes with big lenses and bigger tripods, and then shoot with my elbows tucked well in - so I'm blaming any deficiencies in these two images on that.

I always pull a sceptical face when people say they're posting straight out of camera, but the black-tailed godwits have literally just been cropped square - and that had to happen because my panning movement had brought me round to the edge of the window, so the left-hand third of the frame was black. The lapwings have been lightened, but they were very close (almost too close) to the hide, and I only cropped this image fractionally, to neaten the edges by removing a couple of part birds. I really like both photos, but I've chosen the lapwings over the godwits because I like the sense that the birds are almost tumbling out of the sky - there's an individual at about one o'clock that's banking so steeply it looks to be flying upside-down. If you have the time, please do look at both these images full-screen.

I've recently begun using the BirdTrack app to record wildlife sightings when I'm out and about, and I found it especially useful today because it made sure that I remembered everything I'd seen, without having to write a physical list. I logged forty six bird species (plus a roe deer) at Slimbridge, twenty one of which were new sightings for the year. My 2023 bird list now stands at sixty six species, which is about average for me for the second week in January.