An Early Start for Marsworth Reservoir

Checking the weather forecast suggested a bright day, but either I did not see a mention of heavy mist, or there was not one, for I set off in a very thick mist that in parts was better described as fog, making winding country roads without white edge lines particularly hazardous in the early hours, and having had to scrape my windscreen of frost, my dashboard reminded me unnecessarily the potential for ice!

My route had many junctions and I almost missed one as its landmark pub was obscured in the mist. I arrived at Tringford with darkness still prevailing, I parked up and put together my Giottos tripod and  Lensmaster gimbal head, and had already put the Canon 100-400mm lens with 1.4 converter, and slung my 5D MkIII with 35mm f/1.4 around my neck and set off along the path that lay between Startops End lake and Marsworth lake. The Canada Geese or Graylags were hooting and Gulls swooped in and out of the mist over the waters of Marsworth, as I headed along the Grand Union Canal towards the reed beds.

 I made my way carefully and quietly down the bank to avoid creating a disturbance and began setting up the tripod, I had nearly completed when a quiet voice behind me said he had waited for me to finish before alerting me to his presence in case in fright I was pitched into the water! I don't think he realised how true was his statement, for had he spoken at normal volume, I would have jumped clean out of my skin! He introduced himself as Andy, and much later as Andy Brown, and I learned we shared a mutual friend in Mervyn.

My eyes have started to degrade more rapidly of late and this has resulted in my having two very different prescriptions for distance and close work, and today for the first time since my latest glasses, I found that the pair I had chosen which allowed me to view the review screen well were very far from being useful in spotting kingfishers on the far bank, and on this occasion I was indebted to Andy who was clearly able to spot them. I think I am going to have to bring both pairs with me in future, which was not the case before.

As the light slowly improved we both began shooting at high ISO and fairly wide apertures, and it soon became apparent that my decision to check out using a converter on the 100-400mm lens was far less effective than using my 150-600mm lens on its own, so that experiment was a failure! The main reason being that in this low light auto focus was both very slow, and sometimes simply not happening. The advancing light certainly improved the quality of images I was able to get – I was bitterly disappointed with the vast majority of the early shots, and only rising to barely acceptable towards late morning. Another experiment was using the onboard flash of the 7D MkII, again way under-powered to work efficiently, but it did seem to have a beneficial side effect, in that it seemed to make the kingfisher show interest in us!

After Andy had headed off to work for a Conference call, a pair of wood pigeons began courting, and since I had built up an interesting sequence, I have put these in a separate gallery. (click the underlined text above to link to the gallery).

I stayed for an hour or so longer, because it became apparent that the kingfishers had had their fill for our neck of the woods, so I set off back to the car, but along the way I did stop occasionally to record a few landscape shots and also got involved in a few conversations with others walking the footpath.

Cold Marsworth Wind – deters not the Birdlife

Despite getting up early, the drive to Tring Reservoirs was delayed from the start – I managed to mislay a vital piece of camera gear, once found, I then faced more traffic than I had anticipated on the journey down the M1, I then took the wrong route off the motorway and when I arrived at Tringford, I felt I needed to catch up with the Water Bailiff  and one of the anglers before setting off for the far end of Marsworth Reservoir. My arrival time was an hour or more later than my initial intention.

I got myself settled to wait to see which birds might visit me, the main vista was populated by noisy and irritable Coots and numerous Mallard drakes, and for a change the single most quiet of wood pigeons, though many of its relatives gave out their normal chant: “My Toe Hurts, Betty” over and over…

I spotted a juvenile male kingfisher off to my right, for which I had to remove the camera from the tripod and which necessitated my trying to find a viewpoint devoid of intervening twigs and branches. Which reminds me one particular kingfisher annoyingly hid behind a myriad twigs in plain sight for at least twenty minutes, and he returned there later to rub salt in the wound! Or give us photographers – the bird!

A Heron headed towards where I sat, saw me and negotiated the swiftest of flying turns and headed from whence it came, which made me chuckle. I thought that the abundance of ducks might mean that kingfishers might avoid my chosen spot, but for a change, though a pair of males made at least a couple of fly-bys without pausing, individually   eventually my patience was rewarded, and not long after I was joined by a Nikon-toting photographer, who was to make me smile when he informed me he had a screw loose (fortunately, it was one on his tripod!) Well, not totally ‘fortunate’ as it did mean his tripod was less stable.

A while later and a further three other photographers arrived, one of whom it turned out, was a Brogborough windsurfer – what a small world I inhabit! By this time, my neck was stiffening, and the cold wind was taking its toll and I vacated my prime position and headed back up the bank and back to my car, but before finally leaving I took a last few shots of common Terns diving and swooping, but certainly could not match the shots I had been shown by Philip Luckhurst earlier. I did however take a shot of a humming bird, on the arm of a Scottish lass!

It was a surprisingly rewarding morning after all, but I got no shots of fish being harvested by the kingfishers. Another time maybe.

Misty Start at Tring Reservoirs

With the imminent potential move from this house to another a few miles further up the M1 and closer to Bedford, from now on my free time will have a very different set of priorities, and having just missed several promising weather days lost to the start of packing my current home into a series of cardboard boxes, I decided that I just had to pay a final visit for a while, to Tring Reservoirs, and to give myself the best of chances I set my alarm for five o’clock, a time that I have on occasion been more familiar to going to bed, rather than getting up!

As is my wont, I awoke to a light wakefulness a few minutes before the alarm, and reached out to check the time through squinting eyes to avoid the glare from the screen of the phone, and there were some seven minutes to go, but I got out from under the duvet with nothing that could be described as alacrity and started my ablutions. At least I had laid out all my clothes the night before and changed the contents of the pockets to a scruffy pair of trousers that still bore the dried whitish soil from the last trip to the banks of the Marsworth reservoir. I took a quick look beyond the curtains and was greeted by a a grey mist that was almost thick enough to call fog as the shops up and across the road were barely visible.

I showered in haste and only downed a bowl of Muesli as I prepared a small flask of coffee and grabbed some crisps and biscuits and all my camera gear and a backpack which contained a second camera with my 24-105mm, and I was out of the door just short of an hour after waking. The mist lifted as I came towards Kensworth and as I drove down Bison Hill after Whipsnade, I was above the mist that shrouded the plain below, but as I drove towards Tring the mist was rising, yet still hung over the lake at Tringford as I parked the car. Billy the Baker’s house on the far bank showed faintly through the veils of mist floating across the intervening water, so I grabbed two quick shots, whilst holding the camera steady with the tripod dangling as a counterweight, before heading across the road to the banked path between the twin lakes of Startops End and Marsworth, heading towards the Grand Union canal. As I came to the fork in the path, I spotted a pair of grebe starting their dance routine, but this was stopped by the flapping of wings from a heron on the bank, deciding I was too close, both had lost the magic of the moment!

When I arrived at my chosen spot, I had to descend the bank quietly so as not to disturb another photographer who was intently concentrating on taking a shot. Either he lives much closer or is an insomniac as I learned he had been there for more than forty minutes, but there had been little activity thus far, and precious little the day previous! We were lucky with herons during our stay as a pair visited and alighted on the tallest branch of the dead tree straddling the water in front of us, but until he departed a couple of hours later we only had flybys by a kingfisher or two, but three quarters of an hour after he left, I did see a pair, but only one landed and on both occasions I was shooting through branches and at a distance which was a shame; the wind rose and I was ill-prepared for the wind-chill it brought and before my limbs froze, I called it a day and took the long walk back.

Early Visit to Marsworth Reservoir

Arriving at the water's edge, I immediately spotted a lone Muntjac across the water on the far bank, and just before it returned to the undergrowth managed to grab a quick shot, albeit with foliage and branches obscuring its hind legs, then moments later, a squirrel, scurried down a tree trunk and disappeared into a bush with its mouth full.

The air was filled with the unmistakeable sounds of pigeons' flapping their way through the leaves all around me. The next visitor was far too quick for me, a heron landed momentarily on a high branch of a dead tree, spotted me, and was away back the way it came, in a trice; sadly, never to return that morning. I got to sit down with the camera on a monopod and my hand on the camera with the 70-200mm lens. I have to own up, that was not by choice; I had been careless when packing the case and chose it mistakenly for the 100-400mm, but so be it, it did at least offer an extra full stop of exposure to make up for the far smaller image!

The light was kind to me, it had a softness due to slight cloud cover thereby avoiding the harshness of full sunlight on potential subjects, in this case I was hoping to glimpse a kingfisher. Glimpse was all I got initially, as an orange and blue blur passed across my field of view at high speed, but it was not long before a kingfisher alighted on a far branch, looked around, then dived, and disappeared from view; whether it met with success, I had no way of knowing.

It was quite a while before another visit, so I captured an amusing piece of pigeon life, and it seemed to me as a human observer that a male flew to a branch ostensibly to drink, but in the hope his presence would bring a female admirer, and certainly soon after another pigeon alighted further along the branch, but instead of waiting patiently for a short moment, he immediately sidled along the branch and the second bird simply flew off, he seemed dazed and remained quite still musing on his failure before flying off in the same direction.

I had two more kingfisher visits, and several flybys, together with one quick circling of a bush, and in the lulls, I took shots of some of the fungal growths and the beginnings of autumn in some of the trees, and a charming slim robin gave me the once-over. After four hours I stretched my aching legs and headed for Tringford to meet up with the Water Bailiff, before heading home, but on reaching the turn for Aldbury, changed my mind and took the road heading for Wigginton Bottom.