Martin Mere

I have been staying in Yorkshire with family over the past 4 days and so I was hoping to get some photography done while I was there. There are moors no more than a 20 minute walk from the house which contain several Red Grouse, although I only spent one morning with them due to the weather, and did not come away with any decent images. There are also Grey Partridges and several Little Owls nearby, but again the weather hindered my efforts to photograph these species as well. The images I am going to show here were taken at Martin Mere, which we visited on Thursday. It was only my visit there, but I was pleasantly surprised to see the number of birds feeding very close to the hides. I first went to the Ron Barker hide, although there were very few birds close to the hide, and the hide was pointing into the sun, so I decided that I would try the other side, where the majority of the swans and wildfowl were. On entering the Swan Link hide I was amazed to see all the wildfowl squabbling for the food which had been thrown in front of the hide earlier in the day.

I first concentrated on getting some portraits of the stunning Whooper Swans which were in front of the hide. Having them close enough was no problem, but due to the numbers of them in close proximity to each other, it was difficult to isolate single birds.

I also wanted to get some images of Pintail as I have very few images of this species. There were large numbers of them feeding in front of the hide, although I wanted images of them in flight or on the water. There was an area of trees a long way in the distance to the right of the hide which I wanted to use as a background rather than the sky, and so this meant that I had a very small window of time in which to take the shot. Anyway, here are a couple of images.

As the sun crept towards the horizon, the sky turned a fantastic orange colour, and so I turned my attention to creating silhouettes and backlit images.

 If you haven't visited Martin Mere, it is definitely worth it, with large numbers of confiding wildfowl. In addition to the birds in this post, there were also large numbers of geese, Teal, Wigeon, and other ducks, and Barn Owls are often sighted.

This will probably be my last post for a while (at least with new images) as I doubt that I will have much time for photography over the next couple of weeks. I may post some shots from last year though.