Garden Birds

Welcome to my new blog! Hopefully this will allow me to be a little more flexible with my blog posts and include more photographs. Since breaking up from school (yay!) I have spent a great deal of time in my portable hide in the garden (to be honest the weather has restricted me from going much further afield!) As the weather has been so miserable I have been able to get a perfectly black background from one particular perch which I quite like. To ensure the birds spend long enough on the perch so I have the time to get the photographs I would like, food is hidden inside the perch, meaning the birds have to spend a few moments extracting the food. The sparrows were particularly poor at doing this and would spend minutes at a time on the perch allowing me to get the perfect set up. To ensure the background was solid black I had to (for the first time in ages!) use manual exposure as opposed to Aperture Priority, which took a lot of getting used to!

My next target were the Long Tailed Tits, which have recently raised 7 young at a nest site nearby. Although not visitors to my garden, they can often be found in the scrub areas outside. They were far trickier to photograph than the sparrows as they are very unpredictable in terms of where they are going to perch although with a little perseverance I was able to get respectable shots of the adults and the juveniles.

And finally, one of my favourite birds, the Robin. Hardly the pinnacle of exciting birds but it is one of the few species where I prefer photographing the juveniles to the adults. I was lucky enough to have a pair breeding in a nest on the floor very close to my home and yesterday I was fortunate to witness them fledging! Well I say fledge, they are still unable to fly, so perhaps hop out of the nest into a low lying shrub would be a more accurate description of the event. Of the 3 fledgling, 2 did the sensible thing and immediately sought shelter (it was raining... unsurprisingly!) however one decided to hop the other way into a bog. Now I am strongly against interfering with nature but on this one occasion to decided to help the poor little guy out and helped him out of the bog, and returned him to the patch of forest from which he fledged! Of course, throughout this period I managed to take just over 1000 photographs so below are a couple of my favourites, however more can be found on my website: http://www.alexberrymanphotography.co.uk/titschatsandthrushes