A field trip after work

Thursday meant a field trip for me after work. First I went to Hökällan because I know there has been a successful year for the Common Kestrel there and they actually have raised 3 young so I hoped to be able to get some photos of them.

The afternoon was nice. We had some good light thru the clouds so I had to work with the camera settings all the time once I started to take photos. It is good to really learn your camera and I think many more would benefit from just shooting manual and not with a Mode. You should stay away from P mode period.

At Hökällan everything was quit and this is probably because it is out of season for the area. There are of course Swans there and one can see Grey Herons but they are too far away and you would have to walk out onto the open fields to get there so the chance of not startling them is more or less zero. I checked the Common Kestrel nest box and the activity there was zero, even if one could see a bird there. Instead I focused on the small things and I got some nice photos like this Dragonfly.

It was hiding so this was the only type of picture I could take. It is not a truly interesting picture for me because it is too much 2 dimensional. I would have liked to be at the same level as the Dragonfly, more or less, but it wasn´t to be this time. This is a rule that one always should have in mind when you take photos of animals. If you are at the same level the photos become more interesting.

Once I left I headed home for a quick snack and then I went back to the fields at Säveån to see if I could find the Reed Bunting or Whinchat from yesterday. At first there wasn´t much to see and the wind had picked up so it was hard to lure the birds to you by playing a bird song.

So I explored the area some more to get a full grip of how it actually looks and this was a wise move that brought me some nice pictures of both a Whinchat but also a Greenfinch sitting on a barb wire.

One gets an understanding of the size of the birds when you see the barbs on the wire. The most interesting part in these pictures, at least for me, are to see how big the claws are that grip around the wire. I really understand how they can hang upside down when you see the claws like this.

When I walked home I took the same route as yesterday and too my luck the Whinchat family was out searching for food. They were further out but I got this picture with a lot of habitat.

The bird has just caught a snack and jumps from the vertical “branch” to a horizontal one. I like this picture. If you don´t know what just has happened one could think of the bird is jumping up and down on the branch.

An interesting field trip even if I didn´t get the Kestrel photos that I was looking for.

Photo Gallery: A field trip after work