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

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.

Red Kites

My friend Rich and I decided that we were long overdue a trip to the Red Kite feeding station at Gigrin Farm in mid Wales. It was 2006 that I was last there so some new pictures of the Kites were desperately needed. We chose what was supposed to be a clear sunny day, I say supposed to be. There was a lot of dark cloud about and very little sunshine which isn't good for flight shots.
The birds were fed and the frenzy of several hundred Kites circling and diving was quite a spectacle. We made the most of the brief spells of the sun, which only totalled about twenty minutes throughout the afternoon. I was trying to achieve shots that were a little different from the norm which went reasonably well. Another trip is on the cards later this winter though, this time with a clear afternoon.