Wood Warbler

located this beauty in the Humber Bridge viewing area car park this morning but after performing very well prior to the camera coming out it then disappeared into the tree tops and was incredibly elusive -- I managed to take 5 shots of it in the thick foliage and only one was sharpish!

Greenshank

this juvenile was doing quite a lot of fishing -- the small fish were jumping out of the water as it dashed after them

Cormorant

Willow Warblers

Swallow juvs

Shoveler

Sedge and Reed Warblers

plenty of acros in the reedbeds still

Migrant Hawkers

the nice warm weather with little wind produced good numbers of mixtas today -- flight shots Canon 1D4 and 500 f4 hand held

Grey Heron

Black-tails --when a subject poses stick with it

will one of these shots show a bird with black axillaries and underwing coverts on the Humber again one day? its 29 and 27 years since the last Hudsonian put in two appearances

digital imagery

I still find it amazing just how far we have come with digital photography in such a short space of time-- this is a well cropped image of a flock of Dunlin in flight -- its not  a great image but just look at how much detail is visible in the different feather tracts of these small waders -- with a decent camera most tricky bird ID problems can now come down to a few 1000 shutter activations providing of course the bird is not hidden in the middle of a bush or 2 km out at sea
I managed to miss the 3 Curlew Sands out of the picture!

Black-tails and passing Peregrine

panic but no mass take off as a Peregrine made a low pass and then off it went -- sometimes you just cannot rely on raptors but maybe 4000 potential prey items was just too much -- of corse the camera should =have been on a larger aperture but I had been shooting flying birds -- sods law

the future

the highlight of a Humber seawatch this morning

flying godwits

I do enjoy action photography for all its frustrations and just occasionally I get a shot that makes me think that's nice -- the first one is my favourite -- birds seldom fly straight at you at a decent height and when they do, moving at 40-50mph like this bird, its a real test for the camera's AF system not least because a head on target is not very big and takes more finding --