Short-Eared Owls in the Frost

There were three Short-eared Owls at Welney on Wednesday - we saw them briefly in the morning quite close as they exited from their roost area. Later we enjoyed watching them quartering Lady Fen at a distance. but still unmistakable

Norfolk Windpumps

This is the final set of 'windpump' images taken with a wide-angle (10-24mm lens) and a graduated neutral density filter plus 10-stop ND filter in most cases. Exposures range from 1 second to 60seconds in the white house on blue water. I captured the one ray of sunshine that day as it illuminated this house.

Wicken Fen RPS Visit

I kept my 100% record of interesting weather at Wicken Fen for RPS Nature Group visits with high winds, magnificent clouds and even a rainbow. In between this we managed some interesting birds. Some of the group got some great shots of the Hen Harrier female and Little Owl - mine come in the 'record' category! There were also fighting Coots, Kingfisher, Heron etc but all these at a 'distance'

 

Swans Awake at Welney WWT

We were very fortunate to have a beautiful sunrise for our early visit to Welney Wildfowl Trust reserve at Welney. We arrived just as the sky was lightening with a beautiful pink glow. As the sun came up the colours changed from pink to orange to blue. It was wonderful to see and hear the Bewick Swans as these are so much shyer than the larger noisier Whooper Swans (the two in the foreground of the second image)

Frampton Marshes Landscapes

The overcast conditions at Frampton on Tueday suited landscape photography very well bringing out the subtle tones and colours

Fen Drayton Pits in the Gloom - Experiments of Fuji Raw Processing

We visited Fen Drayton RSPB Reserve yesterday afternoon when the light was very poor so 3200 ISO was the minimum. For my own future information, some results on using different Raw conversion recipes. I have been trialling the Phase One software as this has the best reviews for processing Fuji XT-2 files. In the images of Redwing and Fieldfare (of which there were hundreds at FD!) the Capture One conversion is first and ACR (Lightroom) second. For the Marsh Harrier, I show the  Capture One, then  ACR conversion, and finally with Nik Define used for Noise Reduction (the best result possibly for this image). Only real conclusion is that it depends on the paricular problem in the image and how much time to invest in processing. Certainly Capture One does a routinely better job on most files against straight ACR processing but the latter combined with Nik Define and Sharpening may well match it in most cases.

The Great Fen Project and Clever Gadwalls

The Great Fen is a habitat restoration project in Cambridgeshire. It is one of the largest restoration projects in the country, and aims to create a 3,700 hectare wetland connecting Woodwalton Fen National Nature Reserve (NNR), Holme Fen NNR and other nature reserves to create a very large conservation site. We had intended visiting last year but somehow the months went by so we were determined to make it in 2016. Woodwalton Fen has a sixeable population of Bittern and also Harriers and Red Kites. We only saw Buzzards in the air but were fortunate to glimpse 2 Bitterns. A return visit definitely on the books.

While waiting for bittern action, I spent time observing the Gadwall ducks - an unusually large number present on a deep Mere (they are dabbling ducks). They were pursuing Coots especially when they dived for food. I researched this on the internet and found a large amount of literature on Kleptoparasitism in Gadwalls. This learned behaviour of pirating food off Coots is thought to be responsible for the large increase in Gadwall numbers in the UK.