I'm on a few days hols, I'm home with the parents and decided I'd try to get a few photos of our most common garden birds. I wasn't left waiting long.
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| Adult Red Kite, Yorkshire |
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| Adult Redkite, Yorkshire |
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| Carrion Crow bravely mobbing a Red Kite and a Buzzard |
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| 2 Common Buzzards, Yorkshire |
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| Common Buzzard cropped |
I walked the fields until lunchtime and saw: Redkites (all untagged, no juvs that I noticed), Buzzards, Jay, Woodcock twice (not sure if 2 Woodcocks or same one twice - great they're still here, Mum hadn't seen them since Christmas), Blue, Great and Coal tits, Robin, Carrion Crows, Jackdaws, quadrabillion woodpigeons, pheasants, BH Gulls c.100, Goldcrests and Chaffinch.
After lunch, the skies greyed and the weather got that nip to it. Didn't stop people climbing the Crag though.
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| Almscliffe Crag, North Rigton, Yorkshire |
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| Red Kite, bad light, uncropped about 5pm - just showing the closeness (well, with 500 lens!) |
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| Red Kite uncropped with 500m lens - 5pm, Yorkshire |
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| My first ever photo of a perched Red Kite! |
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| Perched Red Kite, Yorkshire. (Finally). |
During the afternoon I also saw either a Kestrel or a Sparrowhawk. It was speeding past and bad light and I was a bit frustrated that I'm still not at the stage of being able to i.d between these two birds in quick flight. One day....
I saw a Wren today and was reminded how a couple of years ago I saw a Wren in a similar spot and had to go and look up it's i.d in a book to find out what it was - a Wren! So, things do come with time - and instead of being impatient, I'm sure I should be enjoying the learning curve.
You'll find your stillness in slowness and quiet, you'll find nothing in rushing and noise.
Mind you, as I was mindfully squelching slowly through the fields, I happened to notice that in the middle of what just seemed like puddles of water, there were actually springs flowing up from the ground. I wondered if they might be springs from the earth (Harrogate is full of springs) but maybe it was just excess rainwater pushing itself up from the waterbed? I dunno, either way, I was chuffed with myself for noticing the subtle bubbling.
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| Maybe you had to be there. This was a very exciting bit of water. |
A great first day home. Weather tomorrow isn't supposed to be all that great, but we'll see, my accu weather app has been dramatically wrong in the past.
