Marston Moretaine – Bus Stop Birds in the Bushes

 

On returning down Station Road, having posted a letter, the cacophony of birds in the bushes by the bus stop was to tempting a sight to ignore, so my return trip was at a brisker pace as I considered grabbing my medium weight tripod putting on the gimbal head and the Sigma 150-600 Sports lens and seeing what I might catch in the sunshine.

When I returned equipped, I noticed that there were the first signs of blossom on the branches, and the chirruping was still as busy as when I had passed before, so I just hoped that my presence was not going to be the kiss of death to my chances of capturing some shots of the birds I had spotted earlier.

To give myself a good chance, I had brought along some seeds to establish I was there to show my potential subjects some generosity, and I liberally spread handfuls close to the bushes but at a good distance from where I had set down the tripod.

The bushes were a mass of fine branches, which I knew would make it tough to capture the birds without intervening branches coming between myself and the birds, but there again it was probably also the reason why the birds felt moderately secure. It was not too long before some of the birds began returning, giving me a chance to see what I could capture, there seemed to be house sparrows and starlings as far as I could tell, with the very occasional pigeon coming in, but though I was not going to take shots of them in the bush, When one settled on a nearby roof ridge, I did sneak a couple of shots since it’s arrival in the bushes had caused a few starlings to make a swift exit, leaving them bare of birds.

I stayed a while and was occasionally involved in conversation from passers by, my next door neighbour heading home to collect her children from school, and a mother and young child, who informed me the bushes were hers, so I showed her and the boy a couple of shots on the back of the camera.

Brogborough – Sunshine on the Lake

In the morning, it was Choresday and a priority was ensuring I had clean shirts, and as I seem to have a problem of sediment from somewhere, possibly even due to too much soap powder, I tried to split the wash into two to keep the possibility of shirts suffering from the other items, but this added more time, and still the contaminant was present, so I was well behind schedule. I like to think of Sundays as restful, but sorting two washes was not helping. However, after the first wash, the wind seemed to pick up; certainly giving gusts that seemed harder than was forecast, so someone was on my side!

By the time the second set was ready to put out, at least one shirt was dry enough to be taken in, and suddenly I could contemplate a possible short visit to the lake at Brogborough; what I had not foreseen was that many of the regulars were on holiday, and scattered to all points of the compass, so as I arrived there were around a maximum of ten on the water, with actually less wind on arrival than I had left behind in Marston Moretaine, but there were occasional flurries and I decided it was worth a trek through the woods with a tripod, with the gimbal head and the Sigma 150-600mm atop.

Having made it to the far end of the woods and back out into the sunshine, the wind though still somewhat fitful did have some strength, and several of the windsurfers headed towards my location, so I gingerly clambered down the steep bank and into the undergrowth a bit, to give myself a reasonable angle of view clear of most of the trees and bushes. After a while the wind died down seemingly terminally, so I headed back at a brisk pace, with a young grouse zig-zagging across my path ahead of me for half the woods! I also noted that the recent warmth had brought out the hoverflies who as I had noted before would dance and hover in the shafts of sunlight that filtered through the canopy of leaf cover. I made a mental note that I should come back for this photographic challenge on the next warm, and free day.

I did get the opportunity to show some of those there a few recent prints, some of which windsurfers had been the subject.