Manx Shearwaters

Back in July last year I was a boat trip from Liverpool. This trip is chartered a couple of times a year (weather dependent) by my friend Richard Steel. With a small group of photographers and birders on board, we head out about 25 miles out of Liverpool Bay. The main species would be Gannets, which would be attracted by the chum and bait thrown overboard. These would be diving very close to the boat and are challenging to photograph. I will feature these in a future post.
A few other species usually turn up including kittiwakes, Fulmers, Great Skuas, a mixture of Gulls and Manx Shearwaters. On this particular trip I tried to concentrate on the latter, as they are a difficult species to photograph. It paid off with some reasonable images.

 

Black Kites

Another species from Spain. These opportunistic scavengers were taking the meat put out for the Griffon and Black Vultures that we were photographing. As were the White Storks in my previous post.

 

White Storks From Spain

With a big effort on clearing some of my backlog of images, I am now working my way through last years trip to Extremadura in Spain. Here's a few of the White Storks taken there.

With regular updates there are a lot more on my website: http://stevenround-birdphotography.com

Leach's Storm Petrels

Back in September last year, the conditions were right for Leach's Storm Petrels to come close to the shores around the coast of The Wirral, where I live. Strong north westerly winds over a few days would blow them off course, bringing them within photographic distance. It had been seven years since the timing of the winds had been right. Even the sun was out and shining in the right direction, for what was probably one of the best sessions I have had with these small birds.

They are always a challenge to photograph in the strong gales. Keeping the lens on the bird itself is difficult as the lens hood catches the wind. The birds appear and disappear in the waves, as they roll in. I usually get a good soaking from too. So I always feel a sense of achievement if I manage to get some decent shots.

Iceland Trip - Eider Ducks

Although we had done a lot of research before our trip to Iceland, there were a few things we discovered whilst there. One of these was a large colony of nesting Eider Ducks. The weather was very wet and windy and this being our last day, we decided it best to stay with the ducks, as we knew that we could achieve some good shots here. The males were constantly flying to and from the sea, a good challenge to get some flight shots in the murky conditions. The females stayed put on their nests and were quite hard to spot at times.
It turned out to be a very productive day and the flight shots worked well. The grass is always greener and we wondered what else we could have photographed that day. But we won't be needing to photograph Eiders for some time. I have added 55 new images of them to my main website.

Skylarks

One of my projects through April was to photograph Skylarks. My main aim was to try and get some good shots of them in flight, something I hadn't done properly before. Although tricky, I managed to do quite well with them and was really pleased with the results. Here are a few of the 25 I have uploaded to my main website.