Wild Bird Trust photographers of the week

Wild Bird Trust has one of my pictures in their Top 25 this week on National Geographic’s Explorer Journal. It always a great pleasure to be chosen and many of the pictures this week is of excellent quality.

This is the story of my photo.

It’s a sort of a portrait of a Eurasian Reed Warbler in its habitat. I most often hear them when I am walking at the fields at Säveån but they are hard to photo because they mostly stay in the thick of the reed. This day I tried to lure it out into the open to have a chance of taking some photos. I had heard it and seen it briefly while I was taking photos of a Reed Bunting.

As you can see by this photo I didn´t get it out into the open but still I produced a good portrait with the habitat included. I tried to trigger the birds’ territorial instinct by playing the song from another Reed Warbler. I would say that I succeed by 60% because without the song it wouldn´t have shown itself at all. This is a little trick that works more times than not and it’s just windy conditions that troubles it.

The first time I played the song the bird appeared just in front of me, maybe even to close. It then realized there was a human in the area and took off. Next time I played the song it kept a distance of 10 meters and I had to try a couple of times before the Warbler stopped in a place where I actually could take some photos. It wasn´t out for a long period just 10-15 seconds and I managed to take a couple of photos and this is one of the better.

I have made some tries later on but haven´t been able to lure the bird to even show itself and I remembered that I was happy to have produced a couple of photos of this secretive wild bird.