These sweet and idyllic images of little ducklings could go straight into a childrens picturebook. But the reality is not so nice. These two are only one or two days old and already 8 of their siblings have been eaten by predators. So these little ones will probably be gone in a day or so too.
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Don’t be fooled by the innocent appearance of this fellow. He looks so cute hopping around in our garden, but minutes before I took these shots he made an enormous racket in the trees fighting with a magpie over the eggs of a blackbird. Of course the magpie and the blackbirds made their own contribution to all this noise. Don’t know how it all ended, though I fear very much for the blackbirds nest.
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At the end of our garden is a small canal were we often sit when the weather is nice. The birds that are usually swimming there seem to like the attention and start giving a show.
Here a shot of a coot that is really enjoying himself:
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The geese are not te be outdone:
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Today the meteorological spring has begun. High time to get this blog out of its hibernation, give it a new theme and dust off my gear.
This blackbird doesn’t need telling that its spring, she has been at it for weeks already.
Today I got lucky. A sparrowhawk landed in the bushes in the neighbours garden, waited for me to go and get my camera, attach the right lens etc. and only flew away after I had taken a few shots. How about that!
Some more shots of the fieldfares, in the snow this time: a nice one, a scruffy one and a ruffled one:
Suddenly our country is awash with fieldfares. In normal winters you only see a few of these birds, but in a very cold winter like this one they come in droves searching for food like the apples we feed them.
I said I would be back as soon as spring announces itself. Well you have to look long and hard, or rather, you have to look very long and very hard for signs of spring and still you won’t find any. Unless, that is, when you watch the birds. They are already busy inspecting suitable property for raising their family coming spring. This bluetit for example is admiring the view of his prospective new home:
A couple of weeks ago I have been playing around with an infrared filter. I used an old Nikon D50 I had still laying around together with the old non-vr 18-55 kitlens and a cheap infrared filter from ebay. The test shots below are the only ones I ever took. Though it was quite fun you need bright sunshine for infraredphotography and in that kind of wheather I rather pursue bugs or flowers then that I shoot gloomy landscapes. But now seeing the pics again I think I may give it another try sometime.
Now that I have stacked my macrolens away for the winter I try to focus on the birds on the garden, though I am not really patient enough for that. Moreover the light is often so bad that most of the time I can’t get the shutterspeed I need. Still every now and then I manage to get a decent shot.
The fins bit should have been relatively easy for me as we have a fish tank in the house, but it still took an awfull lot of patience as even the most boring of fish becomes a nervous swimmer the moment you point a camera at it. But I finally managed to get a few in focus:
These are our feathers. A couple of hens that have great fun together but refuse to lay eggs an a regular basis, thus endangering their own lives. I already showed them my book with chicken recipes but they were nog impressed. Insulent creatures!
Finally, as my regular visitors already know, my favourite bit of fur:
Can’t remember taking this picture. I must have pressed the shutter by accident while I was sitting in the grass trying to shoot something else. Still I kind of like it so it gets a place on my blog.
I don’t ‘do’ much birds in summer. It is just too difficult with all those leaves on the trees. But this thrush was coming really close, drawing attention with his elegant poses and almost begging me to take his picture:
OK, I know I am going to be disqualified for this weeks Sunday stills because this is neither a watertower nor a grainsilo. But there simply aren’t any of those in my nick of the woods. So I made a picture of something that comes rather close at least where shape is concerned. It is a dovecote that has more or less the shape of a silo and with a bit of luck, when the birds have just been fed, you will even find some grains inside 
A whole bunch of young blue tits was using my garden as a playground:
Of course I had great fun too trying to catch them with my camera.
The fact that this one could land on the surface of the pond made my realise that I had quite some work to do there.
My entry for this weeks sunday stills challenge:
Though they only just raised a family, the dunnock male is trying to seduce the female to produce yet more offspring by showing her his ehh behind.
When he has got her attention he starts to wag his tail at enormous speed.
The next picture is rather out of focus because they moved away and it all went so fast. But I am including it anyway because it shows a part of the male’s physique we don’t get to see normally.
The birds in the garden are so busy building nests and defending their territory that they don’t have the time to worry about humans with their camera’s. Unfortunately they also don’t have the time to sit still for more than a quarter of a second. That goes especially for the chiffchaff I was chasing today. Very frustrating to find this tiny fellow so near so often and still nog being able to take a decent shot. Well here are my best efforts:
The garden is awash with blackbirds these days, all chasing and courting each other as if spring was just around the corner. I so hope they are right, though the weatherforecast still contains words like snow and frost.
When we were little childeren and playing noisy games my mother would interfere and suggest we play ‘statue’. We had to stand absolutely still, no noise or movement whatsoever and the one who could keep it up the longest got a price. I usually won from my older brother but I am sure I never could have won from this blue heron. And even when he does move he does it with such dignity that he is still looking like a moving statue.
