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Sunday, 21 April 2013

Favourable Winds

Spring migrants have been in short supply until last week when the strong south to south-westerly winds provided the ideal catalyst for mass migration. The highlight was the high number of White Wagtails that were grounded from mid-week until Friday night. Quite a few sites in Leicestershire & Rutland recorded large groups with the highest being 54 at Rutland Water. At Brascote Pits I counted 11 on Friday night. As well as the White Wags, good numbers of Yellow Wags and Wheatears were also seen.

Northern Wheatear, Croft Quarry
Northern Wheatear, Orton-on-the-Hill
Yellow Wagtail, Orton-on-the-Hill
At Brascote Pits, a Common Tern appeared yesterday and I noticed that it was ringed. A ringed bird has been returning for at least five years, so as one of the pair has always had a ring I guess this is the same one. The photo of the tern was take using my camera mounted on my telescope. I have to say that it is more than acceptable considering.

Common Tern, Brascote Pits


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2 comments:

  1. Darren Robson21 April 2013 at 22:53

    Cracking pics Carl - male Yellow Wags are beauties. Difficult to see up here in Cumbria unfortunately. The tern photo looks very sharp, when you say it was taken using your camera mounted onto your scope - do you mean your DSLR rather than your Coolpix? If so how did you do that? Presumably some sort of adaptor?

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  2. Carl Baggott22 April 2013 at 18:34

    Hi Darren, yes my DSLR mounted to my scope. I use an adapter that I purchased from the Rutland Water Birdfair from a company called SRB-Griturn - http://www.srb-griturn.com/digiscoping-622-c.asp

    The adapter was about £50 and I also purchased a third party electronic shutter release from Amazon very cheaply.

    It works pretty well for record shots and if the bird is close enough it produces quite reasonable images. All of my gull photos were taken with this set up often in poor light. There is no extra magnification unlike when using a compact camera with a zoom and no way of altering the F stop or auto focusing. The benefit over a compact camera is the image quality is superior when you get a sharp in focus image.

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