Well, what a week of weather! Nearly 3 inches of rain, and spread out perfectly to colour every dog walk (bird watch) I went on this week. It's been a challenge to get my waterproofs dry between walks!
As a glasses wearer it was another week of much hunkering down under a hat, hood and full waterproofs which make seeing and hearing the birds a real challenge. Let alone getting around with several of my planned routes blocked by flooding from swollen streams, or just large / deep pools of standing water beyond the height of my walking boots...and on Friday 23rd and Saturday 24th, it was even too windy to keep my hat on!
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| Walking in the rain (again), a theme of this last week. |
I thought I'd have a reasonable chance of adding at least one of the semi-common ones that have remained off the patch so far this year, including a Feral Pigeon, Nuthatch, Treecreeper, Grey Wagtail, Mallard, Mute Swan, and a Grey Heron. But alas, no success this week.
Among my 6 largely soggy patch walks in daylight this week, there were still there are some really nice moments, with the highlight been spending about 10 minutes watching a female Kestrel in a southerly gale, hunting and then perching on a nearby tree in the Great Meadow. It let me watch it at work within 25-50 m, which through my 8x binoculars allowed me to see some lovely details on the bird. I've seen both male and female Kestrels on the patch in the last few months, so there is hope that we may have a chance of a breeding attempt in 2026.
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| A rare nice moment between showers in Cranbrook's Great Meadow |
On Saturday the 24th the final day of the week I decided to take the plunge and do my annual RSPB Big Garden Bird Watch, picking a short-lived drier spell between bands of rain, it was still blowing a gale though. I did this alongside my 3 year old data, for whom an hour of concentration remains a little bit of a stretch, but she was a great help practising her counting with the Goldfinches on the sunflower hear feeder. 6 species recorded in the hour, with once again (as last year) the House Sparrows by weight of numbers being utterly dominant in my garden. All results submitted online to the RSPB (a top notch charity in my eyes).
To try and get a few bird photos into this blog, I've bought a now discontinued second hand Nikon 80-300 mm lens from eBay (for £110) to pair with my old Nikon D3100 DX DSLR (available for just £58 used at the moment). This is a very cheap setup, and coupled with free opensource Darktable software (instead of pricey Adobe Lightroom / Photoshop subscription) running on my cheap Chromebook. Surely this setup must be at the very cheapest end of what is possible for wildlife photography.....combined camera / lens / computer worth <£350! - and I already had £240 of this.
The DX bit means I have a smaller sensor (not the a full frame), which makes this lens actually have 50% more reach (so equivalent to 450 mm...which feels between a 8 and 10x powered binocular).
However, the lens is not weather proofed (so no use outdoors this week), and with a large minimum F number (small maximum aperture) it struggles to get fast enough shutter speeds to not give blurry images in poor light too. Hopefully in the next week or two we'll get it out and photograph a few birds (with questionable quality), but for my first week with this lens, I've just photographed a few birds in the garden through the living room window when the sun briefly came out (mainly House Sparrows, for the reason of abundance).
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| A couple of female House Sparrows in the hedgerow that runs along the southern side of my front garden. Just testing out the new camera / lens / software setup ahead of drier days when I can finally take it outside. |
So following all that, at the end of week 4, the patch total for 2026 remains at 46, with no new species added this week, but much enjoyment was had, despite all of the rain.
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