Unfortunately birthdays come around every year & I for one realise that I really am not getting any younger. This week was no special birthday but with lockdown & not really the exercise & workload of normal times I do feel a bit older. But it is surprising how birthday treats & presents make you feel happier about things. I had a delicious rib eyed steak for main meal, with a great glass of red wine, which always helps & then there was the my presents. I had an exhausted Ipad so the wife contributed towards a new one for me, one of my sons has got me a swivel head for my camera that will be so useful for some close up work on bugs & buds. The other gave me a portable bird hide, so when lock down is over I can go up on the moors early & photograph the wildlife close up (well in theory anyway). So old age isn’t so bad when you can have such a special day.
Below are a few shots of the hide & images taken from it, plus a few more.
On my last blog I showed you one of the two lambs in the field & it looked like it was dead lying so flat out asleep, above is proof that it is very much alive & healthy.
You have seen it before, but this is my homemade hide, which has been great for taking the static shots of the pond activity& will remain where it is for that purpose.
Well this is my pop up, portable hide, has four seating level openings & one ground level window for those low level shots. The thing with most pop ups is that they are easy to erect but not so easy to put away, as I found out last evening. 🙂
The first image taken from the hide, not sure if this is a baby Robin or Dunnock, but it was cute.
Not a fan of taking birds on feeders, but Woody was so close I just had to, this is a female & both it & the male are feeding young close by in the woods, not sure where the nest is.
Last one from the hide, late afternoon & the sun was just catching it’s eye & beak, which made it stand out against the blackness of it’s body & background, to be honest I totally love this shot, it was just a pity it had all that messy food in it’s beak.
Showing I am young at heart, I could not sleep on my birthday morning, call it excitement or maybe the call of the loo, not sure which. Anyway I decided to take the camera out into the garden in my dressing gown & see what was about. 3 Red Squirrels, that were to quick for me at that time of the morning, usual Blackbirds waiting for their sultana feed at the back door. Plus when I looked in the pond the Goldfish were having an orgy, now this is a sight I have not witnessed in my pond before virtually all 9 were gathered in the shallow section above the weed bed, with truly frantic movement. Went out an hour later (when dressed) & nothing, so maybe they were aware of my normal time of feeding them & were to embarrassed to exhibit such raw sex in front of me.