With a free afternoon, and Fly Flatts out of bounds until the weekend, plus the heavy rain showers, it was off to Ogden at 1330 hrs in a mix of sunshine and showers, the latter getting heavier and more frequent as the afternoon went on. The wind was W>5 but this is rarely a problem at this location being sheltered by the trees.
With the water cleared of yesterdays wildfowl fall and now just holding a single Cormorant, 9 Common gull, 1 LBB gull and around 100 BHGs plus the usual Mallards I walked the perimeter of the water concentrating on passerines.
Several Robins were around the passerine alley area, some of which had the slim smart look and very orange breasts denoting continentals.
The west bank was where all the action was by first catching up to the Chaffinch flock in the NW corner working their way through the Willows just above the water line. With no banking exposing their favourite weed the flock may struggle this year with only around 30 at present whereas last year they were by now up to near 100 with Brambling starting to join them.
The next 10 minutes found a few Wrens, Dunnocks, Blackbirds and more Robins before coming across the tit flock high up in the Beech trees. As usual this was in the darkest part of the track where it was nearly too dark to see the birds but with the camera opened up the amazement of Canon technology brought the birds out like daylight even though not sharp.
The flock consisted of around 8 Goldcrest, 3 Long Tailed Tits, 12 Coal Tits, 1 Treecreeper and several Great and Blue Tits working their way through the tree tops back towards the north end. At one point whilst I was scanning with the bins I was sure I got an eye stripe for that flash of a second but I,m not even going to go down the Firecrest route, even though it was in the same area as DF found the last one.
Back on the promenade, now in heavy rain, a scan down into the dark depths of the sluice gate area found one Kingfisher on the large overflow pipe and a second bird on an overhanging branch about 10 ft away from the first bird which then moved to its favourite spot on the railings.
All in all an interesting 2 hours with nothing special but something to watch throughout plus a quick talk to JL.
My rig for today , due to the weather and woodland watch, was the Canon 7d mk 2 with the Canon 300mm fixed lens plus a 2x convertor in my pocket. This set up is much lighter and easier to carry round under the coat and a faster focus for those small jobs in poor light.
All the woodland shots were taken at 300mm and I put the 2x converter on for the Kingfisher taking it up to 600mm but the 7d mk2 is a 1.6 crop factor camera body so you,re actually taking it up to 920mm which is really unusable in that sort of light situation but you can still get away with record shots with its amazing ISO range without producing too much noise ( mosaic patterns) on the image. Excuse camera talk but I get lots of e mails asking me what I use and settings etc.
BS