Little Owls in Wychbold
Thanks for having a look at my latest blog post! This time I've been down in Wychbold near Droitwich in the Midlands photographing little owls.
Little owls, aka owls of Athena / Minerva, are spread across most of mainland Europe, Asia and the north coast of Africa. They're small, as the name suggests, around 20cm in height and survive on a diet of insects, worms and small mammals such as mice. I was photographing them in early June when the adults were busy doing trips to and from the nest with worms and mice to feed the chicks.
The nest was set up in this beautiful old oak tree, on Brine Pit farm , with the hide just 10 metres or so away. I would recommend the hides for a visit. They're easy to get to being just off the M5 on a beautiful , peaceful farm surrounded in abundant nature with a selection of rustic old farm buildings.
The little owl wasn't the own bird interested in the worms that morning. Alongside a number of jackdaws, an attentive adult common woodpecker was feeding his large fluffy chick.
It was a perfect day for photography with beautiful morning sunshine through clouds illuminating the subjects who were out close to the hide constantly. The birds were very co-operative subjects, with beautiful backgrounds behind them. I think I broke my record for the number of pictures in a single day, I came away with around 4,000. It was one of those days where you know getting home and sorting through the pictures worth keeping is going to be a mammoth job!
I was shooting with a Canon R5, with the RF100-500mm lens. I took the pictures at the lowest aperture I could when zoomed in at between 350-500mm, which was usually f/7.1, to blur out the background. I tried to do a few in-flight shots at a faster shutter speed, although this was harder as the little owl tended to do very short, fast flights without any indication he was about to set off.
Anyway, I hope you like the pictures. If you have any recommendations for wildlife photography hides or other experiences in the UK please do let me know below in the comments. My next shoot is going to be seeing a badger sett in the peak district next month.
Who Doesn’t Love A Toad?
I've always loved frogs and toads and newts. We used to have a pond in our garden where I grew up in Wiltshire where we had Great Crested Newts that took up residence and I've loved amphibious pond life ever since.
Common Toads actually spend very little time in the water, and generally will live in secluded, damp, shady patches of woods for most of the year only seeking out their ponds when it's time to mate. This usually happens at the end of March or beginning of April when toads will gather in vast numbers to mate.
I went with Francis Taylor, who runs some excellent wildlife photography workshops, to check out a few spots near Sheffield where they're known to mate. After some failures where the mating activity had already taken place and the toads had retreated to their woods, we found a reservoir where the toads were abundant.
It was staggering how much toad spawn was there. As you can see in the pictures below toad spawn forms in long strands which were everywhere across the floor of the shallow edges of the reservoir. If you'd have stretched out all the spawn (which obviously is not condoned) it would have been many football pitch lengths. The underwater pictures were taken on my phone , in a plastic watertight case so that it could be activated underwater. This is not the most high-tech solution, and most of the pictures I took were terrible , but a few were acceptable and show off just how much spawn the toads create.
All of this is great news for the birds. The male toads become fixated upon mating and seem to be in a trance. They cling on to backs of the much bigger females they intend to mate, but in some cases you get multiple males all grabbing on to the same female and forming a 'toad ball'. You can see one above. Sadly this has the effect sometimes of drowning the female toad under the weight of the volume of males. In these numbers the toads are often easy pickings for gulls and other birds which was evident by the toad bones scattered across rocks amongst the bird droppings. The birds will likely get another feast as the eggs develop into tadpoles and toadlets and then make their exit from the water.
It was brilliant to see the toads doing so well, reproducing in vast numbers and I'll try and be back next year to witness the spectacle again. Who would want to miss that?
White-tailed Eagles around the Isle of Mull
I’m just back from an amazing trip to the Isle of Mull off the west coast of Scotland where I’ve been photographing White-tailed Eagles, aka Sea Eagles. They are a magnificent sight up close, with a wingspan over two metres and displaying amazing agility for a large bird, adjusting their position to catch prey. They are the UK’s largest bird of prey and Mull is a great home for these birds. White-tailed Eagles went extinct in the UK in the early 20th century and the population in the UK now is from reintroduced birds. Disturbing the birds is illegal because of their conservation status.
We went out to sea from Ulva Ferry and had six different birds visiting the boat, some on multiple occasions. Each fish they consumed is about 100g, so only a small contribution to the diet a White-tail needs of about 1kg or more of food per day, so the boats don’t replace the need for the eagles to hunt for food. In fact, as fishing has declined in the area this replaces, to some extent, food they would have got from fishing boats.
Mull is a rare haven for wildlife in the UK; my wife saw two Golden Eagles as soon as she dropped me off for the ferry , as well as an otter which are reasonably common around the shoreline (I missed that one too). I couldn’t complain too much as I was lucky with how many eagles we had the opportunity to photograph. I went out with Gary Jones who organises regular trips to see the Eagles, on the Lady Jayne run by Mull Charters. If you come to Mull you should also check out the Highland Cows that hangout on the beach! We saw some at Lochbuie
The birds dived for fish thrown a short distance from the boat. I shot with a 100-500mm Canon R5 on a fast shutter speed and with the aperture wide open on high speed continuous plus. I was shooting mainly about 200-250 as the birds are so quick it’s very easy to cut off one of those massive wings when you’re zoomed in too closely. When I got back on dry land I found id taken a few thousand pictures, with many more out of focus than in, and many hours of reviewing and deleting pictures on my hands. Here are a few of the decent ones, including two available on the site if you’re after a framed picture.
If you’re tempted to come up to Mull to photograph the Eagles I’d recommend coming up for a week, there’s quite a few great places to stay (try looking on Air BnB) and some nice restaurants. Reach out to me on my comments page if you want any recommendations. I regret not having long enough to go out looking for otters, (there are people on the island who can help you find them) and to head up Ben More looking for Golden Eagles who are also commonly seen on the isle.
Hope you enjoyed the blog post. Let me know if you’ve tried photographing these wonderful birds before and if you have any tips to share on getting the perfect shot! Check out more of my pictures and keep in touch by following me on Instagram.
Buzzards at Berwick Bassett
Blog post about my trip to Berwick Bassett in Wiltshire to photograph buzzards
Hello and thanks for checking out my blog. In this first post: How I started photographing wildlife, what I've learned so far, and some notes from a brilliant buzzard shoot.
I shoot with a Canon R5 and a 100-500mm Canon lens. I got it about six months ago and am still working out how to get the best out of it. I've done workshops with local experts who gave me tips and tricks to adjust the controls and settings to get the most out of the camera, and am definitely now finding it much easier to keep the subject in focus. In my experience knowledge is more important than getting the best kit - and don't underestimate how much time it takes to learn how to use and get value from the functions you've invested in. Also - you never stop learning so please share your best tips.
I have been photographing wildlife seriously for about four years. What got me started was a visit to Tom Way's fox photography hide in Buckinghamshire. I have always loved being out in the wild, and photographing from a hide lets you observe nature in a whole new way - plus you get to enjoy a level of peace and quiet that most other hobbies can't match.
There's plenty of peace and quiet to be had in rural Wiltshire, where I grew up, and that's where I headed earlier this month - to Dave White's farm in the village of Berwick Bassett near Avebury, to photograph Buzzards. Luxury isn't necessarily a word you'd associate with wildlife photography - but this hide was one of the most comfortable I've visited, with pleasant seating, heating and brewing facilities. I was initially wary of photographing through glass, being used to hides with a hole for your lens, but this worked just fine and I'm not sure the glass had any impact on the pictures at all.
I was lucky that the buzzards were visiting all day. There was plenty to admire as five or six of these hefty (by UK standards!) and elegant predators posed, helpfully, on posts, or competed with one another for food. I had to turn up the ISO quite high to freeze the image, particularly in the early hours but found that Lightroom's Denoise function removed the graininess that resulted. It was well worth the long drive from Manchester, and I was really happy with the pictures I came home with.
