The Nest

Since Covid restrictions took control of my life, I've spent a lot of time in the garden and in recent months I've been working on taking better photos of the birds that visit me there. There aren't as big a variety as I'd like, but they give me something to do from time to time. I first wrote about them last November after taking what is to date my best photo of a bird in flight.

That bird was just visiting but we have some that set up home in our garden for a while. Among those is a strange little weaver bird which keeps constructing nests, then demolishing them and starting new ones. Here he is hard at work constructing one of his early nests in August 2021.

Initially I wondered what happened to all the nests he built. I thought the wind had blown them away, or that some other species of bird was trying to chase him away, but a friend told me that his strange behaviour is normal for the species. However it was only recently that I witnessed him demolishing his most recent nest. Unfortunately I was unable to get an uncluttered view of him in action. But I did get a couple of shots of the half-demolished nest when my presence chased him away.

This was a pretty straight forward view, which I nearly entered for DPChallenge's Wabi Sabi challenge.

In the end I decided this one was more interesting.

He finished the demolition after I went inside and seems to have no plans to build another nest on that bush.

Spotted Dikkops

I first became aware of Spotted Dikkops when a couple moved into our garden in late 2009. The female laid two eggs but only one hatched that year.

Sadly the little one didn't survive for very long.

The mother's reaction to losing her chick was very sad. I wrote this in the comments about the above photo at DPChallenge on December 30th, 2009:

I'm totally devastated. The baby is dead. When I've looked out of the window this morning I've seen the mother go up to look at him a couple of times and then she stares at me as if she is asking for help.

I keep going back to the window to look in the hope that he is just sleeping and that he'll still move, but he's been lying there for a long time now and I know that it's not going to happen.

I wish I knew what went wrong because the parents were so protective.

I did manage to immortalize the little one on video but the quality isn't very good.

Next summer they were back. This time both eggs hatched and once again I caught them on video.

Once again the little ones didn't survive for long.

They didn't visit again until late 2019. By the time I spotted them in our garden there was already one juvenile, which was bigger than the ones I'd seen in earlier years. As I watched him grow, start exercising his wings and jumping around, I was hopeful that he would survive.

He "posed" for several photos that I liked.

This photo didn't do particularly well at DPChallenge, but I really like it. I titled it "Belly Flop" because he looks as if he had fallen. In reality he was resting in the grass and decided to stretch his wing.

The following photo was taken 18 days later. By then I'd noticed that he was starting to limp, and when I went into the garden he tried to hide in a corner but I managed to get really close and got this portrait.

That was the day I became aware that something wasn't quite right. It was suggested to me that he'd broken one of his wings in an attempt to fly.

The family stuck around a little while longer, then one day they vanished.

The parents returned a week or so later, but I never saw the young one again. I don't know what became of him.

Moving forward to December 2021.

When I was in the garden a couple of weeks ago I spotted a couple behaving as if they were at home. I hoped they were planning to stay. Unfortunately they didn't, but I managed to get a few shots I liked including the one at the top of this post.

When Photography Feels Like Cheating

 In the good old days BC (before Covid) I was always rushing around and very rarely spent time in my own garden. Lockdown changed that. Although there's not much of interest there, I spent a lot of time in the garden taking photos of the same boring things. Then a few months ago I developed an interest in bird photography. 

The purchase of a Canon M6 Mark II made it much easier to capture birds in flight and allowed me to catch what would previously have been "the one that got away" - photos that my slow reflexes would never have been able to catch without the assistance of pre-burst shooting.

Pre-burst shooting is when you half press the shutter button to focus on your chosen subject and wait until the decisive moment to fully press it. As long as the shutter is half pressed, a special feature on cameras like the M6 Mark II allows the camera to temporarily save 30 seconds worth of shots in the buffer, and a full press will tell the camera to save the last 30 seconds worth of those shots to the memory card. 

I confess in the beginning it felt like cheating. But I soon realised that it still takes effort on my part to get those shots. Effort and a lot of patience.

Here is one of my favourites.

Grasshopper Noir

I've been procrastinating horribly with moving the last of my bonsai posts to their new domain, but over the last couple of days I've decided to get the work finished once and for all so that I can turn my attention to working on my trees and writing new posts.

What's been slowing me down is the need to change the watermarks on my photos. While working on that a little while ago, I decided to experiment with the photo I used in a post titled A Visitor to the Bonsai Garden.

The post is about a beautiful grasshopper that I discovered on one of my trees a few months ago. He was quite the most colourful grasshopper I've ever seen, and yet when I opened that photo today I couldn't help wondering what it would look like in Noir.

I really liked the result, but I felt it was a little too quirky for that blog. If you'd like to see what he looks like in colour, you can see him there. There's a video too!

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Linking up with Nature Notes, Black and White View and The Weekend in Black and White.

Growing in the strangest places

Plants seem to spring up in the strangest places. I discovered this little weed growing in a hollow in the trunk of a palm tree and couldn't resist stopping to take a photo.

Perhaps it's my love of bonsai that has made me look out for this kind of thing.