Young Birds

My feeding stations become very busy at this time of year, mainly with newly fledged youngsters. The adults keep a low profile as they start to moult and aren't very photogenic anyway, with missing and worn feathers from their hard work over the last few months.

They seem to have done well this year with plenty of young Blue, Great and Coal Tits eating their way through peanuts, fatballs and sunflower hearts at a great rate of knots. The Long-tailed Tit flocks pass through regularly but haven't shown any interest in the feeders this year, not as yet anyway.

A single Great-spotted Woodpecker offspring has been attending for a couple of weeks now, and although I set up various branches and logs for it to land on, it tends to go straight on to the feeder, a bit frustrating and now it's losing it's red cap, another week or so and it will look like an adult.

Blue Tit

 Coal Tit

 Great Tit

Great-spotted Woodpecker

Redstarts

The Redstart is one of those species I find that I have to photograph every year, even though I have many hundreds of images of them, it's almost like an addiction. The Welsh woodlands are full of them at this time of year and so I spend quite a bit of time over there. The pair I photograph seem to have bred a little earlier than usual this year and the young had fledged at the beginning of June. I was hoping to get shots of the adults feeding the young away from the nest, but last weeks weather put paid to that, hopefully they won't have become too independent when I go back this week.

I'll probably do another post in a few weeks if all goes well, for now here's some of this years shots, starting of with a few of the the star of the show - the male, one of the female and then a young chick.

 

Bright and Beautiful

The male Yellow Wagtail is one of the most, if not the most, vivid and colourful birds in the UK, the female is also a very striking bird but lacks the yellow head.  I always enjoy my annual Spring visits to try and photograph them, even though they are quite elusive. You can hear them calling from the fields but the vegetation keeps them well hidden.  After several trips and many hours I  managed to get some reasonable shots:

 

Cute and Cuddly

Each Spring I spend some time photographing ducklings, these are usually Mallards, as being common are easy to find. This year I specifically wanted to get some shots of Canada Geese goslings, although the adults are very common, you don't see a great deal with goslings, not in my part of the world anyway. A local park had a pair that had two very approachable youngsters which I spent a few hours with.
Locally I found a family of Mandarin Ducks that had eight ducklings, this was an unexpected bonus as I had never photographed them before.

Canada Goose

Mandarin Duck