Mouthful

I cannot tell a lie: I was hoping for a chance to get better photos of the bearded reedling when I went to Upton Warren this afternoon, and my heart sank when I walked into the concrete hide and was told that she'd been seen there earlier but had now moved on. The decision I had to make was whether to chase after her, or stay put in the hope that she'd come back, and I opted to stay on the grounds that even if I found her, nowhere else on the reserve was likely to provide me with as close an encounter as this hide. Two and a half hours later she still hadn't reappeared, and by then I was cold enough to take a dead camera battery as a signal that this wasn't going to be my day, so I called time on my shoot and headed for home.

There wasn't a great deal going on at the Moors Pool, but I did see some nice birds, and I've posted a few of them to my Facebook page if you'd care to take a look. This little wren was the last bird of the day, spotted by my hide companion as it popped out of the nearby hedge and began fossicking around for food, and enthusiastically pursued by both of us until it flew back into the hedge and plumped itself in the middle of a dense tangle of twigs, presumably to digest this large grub. Because they're small, fast, and erratic, I always find wrens a challenge to photograph, and this one was hunting in the shade at the base of the hide, which didn't make things any easier: all I could do was track it, keep pressing the shutter button, and hope for the best. I didn't expect to be keeping many of the images, but to my surprise most of them were fine (if a little grainy), and this "down the hatch" moment is far and away my favourite photo of the day.