Monday, December 06, 2010

Waxwings - At Last!

The cold weather has brought an influx of the beautiful Bohemian Waxwings into Britain, including into south Wales. In the last couple of weeks, I've had fruitless trips to Cardiff and Ebbw Vale in pursuit of these avian aristocrats. (They had always left before I arrived, but often reappeared after I'd gone!)
I half expected today to be third time unlucky as I headed out before dawn under a clear, starry sky for Monmouth, where a flock of twenty or thirty of these birds has been reported for a couple of days.
Unfortunately, Monmouth was shrouded under a heavy fog, the surrounding countryside being beautified by a thick coat of hoar frost.
Anyway, I went to the location I had been given, and there were the birds, about twenty, mostly roosting in a nearby tall tree; but, in rotation, a few would fly down to feed on a white-berried Rowan tree on a grassy area in front of some flats. Conditions were not ideal for photography, with the low light and thick frost. "You should have been here yesterday!", a local man said to me, when the sun had been shining brightly. So, I'd come on the wrong day, but at least the birds were here!
I began taking some pictures, setting the camera to ISO 800, and hoping my handholding skills were up to holding my 500mm f/4.5 lens steady at shutter speeds from 1/320th to 1/500th of a second.
Here are a few of the shots:









8 comments:

  1. Beautifully done- all of them. Boom & Gary of The Vermilon River.

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  2. Cracking shots. I'm still waiting to see some myself which hopefully wont be too long a wait.

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  3. Great set of images Jeremy,there have been some in Bridgend y'day and today,a little closer to home.

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  4. This bird has a Phoenix forelock, very funny! I liked the colors on the wing, it's unique.

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  5. Outstanding captures of a bird I have never seen. Very cool looking bird!

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  6. nice photos! greetings from Barcelona.

    www.kamjey.com

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  7. Truly fabulous photos and taken on almost the same settings on which I took mine a couple of weeks ago and posted on here. Your camera and lenses must be so much better than mine! they are a magnificent sight and I won't ever tire of seeing them. One characteristic i noticed when we had the large flock in Llanishen was that one of two of them would fly away from the main tree-sitting flock and within 20-70 yrds of flying away & calling, they would fly back to the main crew. It was almost as if they were challenging the whole flock to fly away with them!

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