Fledgling Robin Portraits

I spent many hours yesterday waiting for images of a very skitty Green Woodpecker and while waiting for a show I was befriended by an extremely bold juvenile Robin.

This cheeky chap moved to within a couple of feet from me as I sat in the hedgerow and eventually decided to use my raised foot as a vantage point to watch for insects and grubs at the field edge

They say that a bird in the hand is worth two in a bush so with an absent Woodpecker I snapped away on the Robin while marvelling at the huge difference in the two wild birds human acceptance levels.

Damselflies and Chasers

The following portrait images were also taken along with the Emperor Dragonflies on Monday.


Narrow -winged Damselflies about to commence egg laying.

A pair of Common Blue Damselflies mating

Two male Common Blues perched on a reed.

Male Common Darter on Blackberries

A female Common Darter ditched in the pond following an in-flight mating crash

A male Broad-bodied Chaser warming up in the sunlight

Female Emperor Dragonfly

In my last blog I showed the outcome of a territorial dispute between two Male Emperor Dragonflies which resulted in a new male taking over the windmill farm pond.

All visiting female Emperor such as the one below will now readily mate with the new Emperor and lay their eggs in his pond.

Having mated this female attempts a tricky  ' Log rolling'  method of laying her eggs on a piece of floating reed.

She finally becomes balanced but decides to moves on to more stable growing reeds where she can lower herself into the water margins with better balance and control

I managed to capture a head-on close up portrait  before the female finishes laying her eggs and the last image below shows her departing to rest up before going through the whole cycle again later

My next blog will show a few more damselflies and chasers taken on what proved to be a very productive and pleasant way to spend a Monday afternoon at Windmill Farm

A War Torn male Emperor Dragonfly.

I had just watched this male Emperor Dragonfly pictured above win yet another aerial territorial dispute at windmill farm wildlife trust.  He may have won this battle but not without its wings incurring damage as a result of this and several other aerial collisions.

Its rival however had far more damage and unable to maintain a controlled flight it landed in the water where it looked in danger of drowning.

A light wind came to its rescue flushing it towards the water margins where it climbed onto various grasses to gain some height to dry out but its wings were looking really tatty with fifty percent of one missing completely

When it did eventually try to fly it had no control and just flipped over so as with any species that relies on wings to survive it looked like his rival had taken him out.

There was little to nothing that I could do to help this otherwise fine and healthy looking dragonfly so I decided to take advantage and take some interesting close focus images for my records

When I had finished there was still no sign of it being able to control its flight so I moved it to some higher sunlit reeds and left it to take its chances but it looked like :                                                                                            
                                 This particular Emperor had just lost his Kingdom to another !

Dragonfly Portraits

With the hot sunny weather prevailing the local ponds and waterways are buzzing with Dragonfly and Damselfly.

I went back to windmill farm ponds yesterday afternoon looking for Dragonfly reflections and  general behaviour images and was pleased with the posted results.

If you decide to venture out there take some repellent or keep covered up as the local horsefly population has also soared at the moment.

Dipper take-off

The first image below is a montage of the ongoing three images,  It has been produced to bring some movement and behaviour within a single frame to allow the viewer as much time as their eye requires to consider a split second of action at a more leisurely pace.  In this case it demonstrates the moment of take-off which is very difficult to predict in many birds but the Dipper always lowers its head and projects it well forward before doing so therefore making it 'Easier' to capture these behaviour detailed images,  Perhaps 'Easier' in not quite the right word as used above as anyone who has spent hours and days waiting for the right given moment to capture such images will know only to well.  During a four hour watch today we had less than two minutes 'show time' to record our images so you have to be well prepared for action throughout the session

In the last image below the same Dipper is just landing at speed from just above the waterline onto a slippery wet rock which it makes look easy without very much wing action, Its powerful legs and long toed feet seem to perfectly judge and absorb the moment of impact as its speed is reduced to zero.  The more you watch these birds the more you come to realise just how well they are adapted to the challenging terrain that they chose to live and hunt within.

Dipper, Taking a Dip!

We had been watching the Dipper busy diving and feeding for well over an hour at Kennell Vale yesterday when it took some time out for a lot of preening and bathing,  I could understand the preening but why bathing when it had just spent half of the last hour underwater anyway ?

 It was very serious about its cleaning and made an impressive amounts of splashing for quite a small bird as it repeated this exercise around twenty times before moving to a larger rock for some more preening and ear scratching at a leisurely pace,

It then moved off around the waterfalls picking off small insects at the waters edge to finish its day but without resorting to any more diving activities after its clean up,

We were hoping to record more interaction and perhaps even mating by these birds which have a well recorded nest site in the vicinity, But,  No one could have been disappointed with the behaviour display that this active little Dipper produced yesterday !!   But perhaps another day !

The Monarch of West Penwith

Its not every day that you encounter one of the greats of  the  UK's wild animals down here in West Cornwall, but this morning I found myself looking up at the antlers of a seven to eight foot Red Deer Stag just on the opposite side of a Cornish wall about eight metres from me and was I impressed,  You bet I was!  For this first shot I had to hurriedly remove my 1.4 converter from my 500mm lens and back off around 20 metres to achieve the composition for the image posted below.

This fine animal showed no fear or any sign of moving away so I gradually moved in closer taking the next four images as I did so.

But there was more to come ; as another younger stag entered onto the scene to provide me with the portrait in the next image below.

The two stags moved in close together and eventually started to rut with each other providing me with some fine interaction images.

This was followed by the larger older male thrashing his antlers about in some vegetation before they both sat down in the field looking very relaxed,

These two fine stags were still sat there watching me as I retreated from their territory and I happened to look back up to the field opening that I had just left only to see a lovely pair of young Roe Deer stood there silhouetted against the skyline,   What a wonderful Morning !!!

My appreciation and thanks to John St Ledger for telling me of his Red Deer sighting yesterday.