Thursday 13 January 2011

Mini Trip Report - Norfolk - Part 1

Each year in the period between Christmas and New Year, I have always kidded myself that there is loads of time and I am always going to get so much done.  Well after the excesses of Christmas, and the compulsory family visits I find I run out of time and end up achieving nothing in that huge amount of time.  Well this year was different and on 28th December, Jacqui and I got up very early and headed off to Norfolk for four days.

Sadly, the weather was very unkind to us in terms of photographic light with misty, murky and foggy conditions and at the darkest time of the year, I found myself wishing for Nikon like ISO resolution.  While the 7D is very good, I don't think it is as good as the Nikon's that Dave is used to.  Anyway - we make do with what we have, make sure we expose correctly and do our best.

This mini trip report will be in three parts with this bit covering some of the general bird pictures, Part 2 will cover the Grey Seal pups and finally the best bit, the Barn Owls.

With the light, as I said, beggars cant be choosers so here is a small selection.

 Winter plumage Black Headed Gull at Salthouse

 Black Tailed Godwit with shellfish

 Teal Drake at Salthouse

Teal Drake at Salthouse, blowing bubbles

 Turnstone shaking its head at slow shutter speed - bizarre effect

Turnstone at Brancaster

Turnstone at Salthouse

I was grateful to the Turnstones as they are such entertaining and very friendly little characters.  I was laying on the ground at Brancaster getting photos of these, while there were dozens of twitchers looking at very distant tiny speck dots of a couple of Hen Harrier. I preferred to photograph bids I could actually see with the naked eye.  The Turnstones were coming up to me, closer than the minimum focus distance of the 500 and taking a good look at me, and virtually taking seed from my hands.

Sadly, there were no Snow Buntings down at Salthouse yet, although we did see 11 of them while we were up at Titchwell on the first day

Back with the Grey seal pups next time,

Martin

1 comment:

  1. Love the bird images and apparently there is a bumper crop of grey seal pups this year, I can't wait to go and watch them

    Cheers
    Paul

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