A day off to celebrate my advancing years, a second camera body for wildlife photography. What to do?
Lackford Lakes was the chosen destination, which is a Suffolk Wildlife Trust reserve near to Bury St. Edmunds in Suffolk – read more about it here.
It has really nice walks and several hides, and a reputation as a good kingfisher location.
No matter the poor weather forecast, we headed off with rain beating down to arrive in the afternoon. Having been once or twice before, we’re always impressed that there’s no charge for either the car park or the reserve, so duly left donations in the box near reception.
As is often the case, especially when arriving later in the day at reserves, it appeared very quiet with not much happening.
At the first hide, I got this Teal.
Wandering further along, we popped in to the newest two storey hide but it was very quiet.
A marsh harrier could be seen in the distance but I usually find they are mostly too far away to get a good shot.
You can see below this impressive one was gleefully perched on a tree branch looking back in my direction.
I got chatting to a guy who explained he’s retired and visits Lackford quite a lot.
He said this new hide took a long time to build as the reserve had to have safety inspections and provision for a track nearby for fire engines to access should there be a fire.
We agreed that all hides, given their wooden construction are likely to go up quickly should there be a fire and we weren’t sure what other measures could be provided to minimise the risk. The main one would obviously be no one smoking. To be fair, I’ve never seen anyone at a reserve smoking.
I asked the guy if he had captured a kingfisher and he said he did have a couple of shots in his collection. He said there’d hadn’t been many sightings in the last year or two, and he wondered if the building of the new hide had moved them a little further away from this part of the reserve.
We had a brief geeky chat about cameras and photography in general before going our separate ways.
As we reached the hide at the back of the reserve, there was a lot more activity. I got this pair of Canada geese cruising the lake, with their reflections adding to the shot.
And my best shot of the day, this lovely great-crested grebe.
On our way back to the visitor centre, we stopped to watch a very friendly Robin hopping around the branches.
I was telling my wife Kathryn of videos I’d seen on Instagram where people hold out their hands with seeds and robins perch on the person’s hand to feed.
As I held out my hand to demonstrate, I was shocked to see the Robin flying over to me with the intention of landing on my hand. In shock, I hopped back and put my hand down.
I think we were all shocked including the Robin, who now kept watching us with a hopeful look that we had something on offer.
I was taken aback at how tame the Robin was and I took a couple of shots but then we moved on as it seemed cruel to hang around when the Robin was waiting for something that wasn’t going to be on offer.
As we reached the visitor centre, there were lots of blue tits landing on the feeders, and I liked this shot of one of them peering round at me.
As I’m learning with my two cameras now, one has sufficiently high megapixels to help with cropping but insufficient autofocus to capture fast action. The other has fast and robust autofocus to capture the action, but low megapixels so needs more attention in post-production.
I think it’ll soon be time to upgrade! Thanks to zero stock levels and global supply shortages, my gadget lust and impulse purchasing is kept under control, for the moment.
Onwards and upwards…