Stithians feeder

I spent a couple of hours at the hide AM without taking many images,  I missed the woodpecker and the Sparrowhawk which I believe made a successful strike because of the awkward current position of the feeders,  I also noted that there was no show from the Water Rail,  The feeder assembly has been moved from a reasonable right hand front position to the side and is now only really viewable from the side window,   It is far to close to the hide for many bird species, birders

and photographers to be at an acceptable distance apart,

I returned my attention to willows on the right hand side to enable working at a reasonable distance and came up with this rather pleasing natural looking Goldfinch portrait below,

I was joined in the hide by Shaun Martin one of the voluntary feeder fillers around lunch time,  Shaun is also a keen wildlife photographer and the positioning of the current feeder assembly came up fairly quickly during our conversation regarding the photo opportunities available at this hide,  He seemed to agree with my comments regarding the feeder frame positioning also stating that he had another peanut feeder available which he filled and placed on old feeder frames that were at a more comfortable distance near a mature tree line to the left of the hide,  During the following hour we had three visits from a male Great Spotted Woodpecker that knew we were in the hide but was reasonably comfortable with our distance from the nuts,  Images of the SparrowHawk, Water Rail  and other more skitty birds would also be more achievable and frequent at this distance,

During our conversation regards to photography in general,  Shaun and I discussed sequence montages relating to various subjects,  The one below is for you Shaun,  It was good to meet you today