One Afternoon; Two Locations and Subjects

A Claas Act – Combine Harvester at Work

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Birdlife at Harold-Odell Country Park, Nature Reserve

Click Here for the second gallery of Birds at Harrold-Odell Country Park

I had set off to drive to Harrold-Odell Country Park, with the possibly forlorn hope of finding Kingfishers, due to the eponymous lake name, but along the way I was distracted by the signs of a Claas Combine Harvester at work. I parked up when I spotted it looking very much as if it had just completed that particular field, and walked over and learned my assumption to be correct! Fortunately the driver told me where his next destination was, and gave me directions, and he would be making across fields to reach it.

The directions took me to a spot just beyond the wonderfully evocative name of the village, Newton Blossomville, which I had visited on an earlier occasion. Having initially parked in a less than ideal spot, I walked further beyond the boundary of the village and found the obviously ripe field to which he had directed me and there was conveniently a far safer spot to park.

I got out my camera and lens and waited for the Harvester to appear over the hill, having grabbed a few quick initial shots, realised I could make a better choice of focal length on the next time the machine came my way. I also found out that with the prevailing slight wind direction in my direction, I was covered in dry husks that were in the clouds being created in the harvester’s wake! I stuck around till I felt I had covered the activity sufficiently to create a gallery of images, and headed off in my original direction to get to the Park at Harrold-Odell.

Fortunately by judicious means I have thus created two galleries from the one afternoon’s shooting, so will present them in a single narrative.

I knew that I was in for a fair trek, so rather than carry a heavy tripod in the stifling heat I chose my lightest one the Giottos Silk Road carbon fibre one, so that the 150-600mm Sigma lens could be my chosen lens, which by itself is a good weight! I headed into the woods on the right and followed this path anticlockwise around the lake, and was blessed with a tunnel of tree cover for at least part of my journey, stopping along the way to see possible viewpoints, finally ending up in a narrow gap that headed for a spit of land which lessened the distance from the far shore which was crowded by mainly preening birds ranging from Coots to Herons, but ironically my main interest was on a Great Crested Grebe and young Grebling, which originally were at almost the limit of my chosen lens.

A couple were already there, so I quietly erected the tripod and since they were not using the table, I managed to arrange it such that I could lazily sit on the end of the bench seat and have the tripod bring my camera to an ideal eye-level.

There was another table closer even than mine to the water’s edge, but I would likely disturb the three preening and sleeping swans, so I decided not to upset their tranquility by encroaching on their space. Perhaps also their peaceful presence might well serve to allay others’ fear of my being here. Certainly, the pair of Grebe that held my interest actually came closer to me as the afternoon progressed, so this was my reward.

Although I got some nice shots of the flights of the far less attractive Cormorants, my concentration was upon the fascinating interaction of the Great Crested Grebe and its young charge. Intermittently I followed the unfolding behaviour I was witnessing of this pair, and I am left intrigued by what I saw and recorded; I found it very appealing, and unless I was simply too far away to hear any sounds, I certainly heard none from either of the two Grebe I was so eagerly watching and recording.

I would very much to learn more about what I had witnessed, as a cursory look using the internet, there is an abundance of information on the courtship of Grebe, but I found nothing of parent / child relationship of this charming species of bird.

Brogborough Flying Insect Bonanza

Having used the Canon 100-400mm lens a few days back to record the flying insects of Brogborough Lake, mainly once they had settled for brief spells of rest and recuperation, I decided to return with something longer, and I decided that it might be beneficial not only to use the Sigma Sports 150-600mm, but to add their 1.4 Converter to gain a greater image size. Since the camera body was the EOS7D MkII, this in itself gave me a greater effective focal length over the full frame 5D MkIII, with also a faster response.

The slight drawback is the autofocus point is fixed at the centre, making it harder to place the subject off-centre, and so on occasion I reverted to manual focussing. Another snag when using autofocus, was how with moving reeds the focus would hunt or simply drift when foreground features came within view between the camera and subject. The bright weather we are experiencing currently gives me the chance to use the Converter and also to keep the ISO speed low with an adequately fast shutter speed.

Trying to find my subject fast with a long lens is difficult, so I experimented with pulling the focal length wider, to find my subject, then zooming in to bring it both larger and into focus, but this often meant that my subject had tired of that location and moved on whilst I was still either trying to find it or regain focus! From my observations the camera took less time and was more accurate, but suffered from losing focus fairly often, so I tended to attempt a compromise whilst manually focussing by adopting a smaller aperture to improve the depth of field to compensate for my lack of accuracy. It is not often in this country that we have this luxury; it is far more likely we are considering upping the ISO to give us a chance of a small aperture alongside a fast shutterspeed!

It allowed me to observe closely what was happening, and I am sure I was witnessing the female dragonflies laying her fertilised eggs beneath the water’s surface. Something else also was that much like crows mob red kite, I was watching the damselflies doing much the same with dragonflies.

I was sitting on a low bank with my tripod legs spread such that the camera was at eye level and really solid and this meant it was really comfortable, but did make it less easy when it came to later wishing to rise; I was also lucky for at the least the early part to be shaded from the heat of the sun under a blue sky with just a few mare’s tails for clouds, by a tall hawthorn bush to my left.

I was pleased with the end results, but it was a shame there was no regular flight path to give me the chance to attempt to preset my focus and have the insects fly into the sharp zone for them to be captured on the wing, but that’s just greed on my part!