Some changes

This weblog has gone through several metamorphoses, and the most recent one is mainly devoted to my travels this year around Britain, mostly alone in the camper van. The main focus of these trips has been on bird watching and photography so there will be lots of photographs, and the occasional bit of nerdy technical stuff about optical gear. At the same time I am trying to improve my writing technique so the words are important. I do very little to publicise it so don't expect much in the way of comments - although they are very welcome if you feel inspired.

Unless the very mention of camper vans, birds, and photographs acts like a crucifix on a vampire then I hope you will find something to enjoy.

The Brotherhood of the Canonites

Visiting bird reserves not much more than a year ago, I would laugh at the old men festooned with great heavy lenses and telescopes and tripods and backpacks and binoculars. I would travel light - just a pair of compact Hawke 20 x 8 binoculars, and a  small compact camera with a x30 zoom.
Why should I get anything heavier and a lot more expensive when I can get pictures like these, all taken with the Sony HX 50?

Now I'm one of them. I'm a Canonite!

How on earth did that happen? Perhaps the first part of my downfall was getting a book on wildlife photography for Christmas - page after page of gorgeous sharp images, and lots of technical information about cameras, lenses, tripods, and all the rest. I realised that the more distant pictures I had been so pleased to capture with my little camera didn't show up so well when close cropped on a big screen. None of them were really sharp. Before the HX50 I'd owned a Sony Nex 5 inter-changeable lens camera. with its large 25mm sensor it took great pictures, but the longest lens I could get was a 200, and I found I was constantly swapping lenses to get different views. I didn't want to go down the multi-lens route again so perhaps a "Bridge" camera would suit me. Even the best of them are quite cheap and have long zoom lenses. I spent hours trawling through photography web-sites until the awful truth dawned that hardly any of them had a sensor bigger than my little Sony.

There was one though - the Panasonic FZ1000 - which had a 25mm censor and was very well reviewed. The only problem was it did not have the big zoom - only about x16. However, that was still the 35mm equivalent of some massive lump of glass costing thousands. I bought it, and it was excellent. Here are some of the pictures:

Lat last  year I'd set aside a chunk of capital to buy a patch of land behind the house. For various reasons I decided not to buy the land. It was very disappointing because I loved the idea of  having more land to plant and develop, so as compensation I decided to blow a small amount of it on what every bird-watcher aspires to - a telescope. The big idea was to bypass the big lens cameras and use the telescope with a compact camera or phone to take pictures - it's called "digiscoping"

Again I did plenty of research and found that those with ED in the name were much clearer than the cheaper ones without. I had almost decided to go for an Olivon 80mm ED on Ebay but got chatting to one of the staff at RSPB Newport Levels, and he sold me their Harrier ED model. I stayed the night nearby and next day carried the telescope and my tripod on a long walk to a distant hide (much longer than I needed to I later found out.) Using my Lumia 930 phone which has a very good camera, I was bitterly disappointed with the results. I found it very difficult even to use the telescope - it moved too much.
Now believing I had made a bad purchase I went back to the RSPB man who had spent so long and done such good selling job on me. He was very reluctant to offer a refund and in the end convinced me that I had made a good purchase. The trouble was he then sold me a much sturdier, heavier tripod!

As I got to know the telescope better I got better results with the phone camera and really enjoyed using it to watch and identify the more distant birds. All the time I was learning more and more about bird photography - especially from this very helpful website:

http://mikeatkinson.net/index.htm

I had reached the limits of what could be done with telescope and phone, and found I could rarely get close enough with the Panasonic. The more I learnt the higher my aspirations grew. By now I had developed a good relationship with the excellent Carmarthen Cameras. Their after-sales service is all  you could ask for, and they are willing to spend any amount of time demonstrating and advising. To keep this relationship going I would regularly buy from them even though I knew I could get the item cheaper online. Every week I would get their email message and in September we were all invited to their open day on the university campus in Carmarthen. Most of the stalls were manned by experts from the camera companies so we were able to try out a great range of stuff and get the inside information on it. I tried out some of the big lenses on DSLR camera bodies and could scarcely believe how heavy they were. My main contact at CC is Joe so I cornered him:

"Listen Joe, what I really want is a single device which does it all - identify and photograph birds at a distance and nearby, and not need a wheelbarrow to carry around. Is there such a thing?"
"Yes - it's only just come on the market - the Nikon Coolpix P900. It has the biggest zoom on the market - up to 80 times magnification."
"Wow - what's the quality like."
"Excellent. Go and try it out - on the Nikon stall."
I did and I also tried out the other combination I was thinking about - a Nikon DSLR body with another new phenomenon the Tamron 150 - 600 lens. I could see advantages with both, but I was not ready to spend yet more money. The thought would not go away though and some weeks later  I went back to the shop, armed with my own memory card and laptop. I would try both combinations on the card and compare the images on the laptop. That should sort it out.

Joe and his colleague spent at least an hour with me. I'd just about decided to blow the extra money and get the DSLR and Tamron lens. Even though it was a lot heavier and more cumbersome than the P900 it did have a bigger sensor and more glass means more light means better pictures.

"Right" I said, "I'm going to get some lunch. I'll examine the pictures and come back later."

To my surprise I found that a mid range direct comparison of the same scene on both combinations gave the advantage to the P900. Joe was convinced it was the right one for me but they were so popular it was difficult to get hold of one. The one I had tried was promised to another customer. He went away to talk to the boss and came back saying:
"I've done a bit of a fiddle and I can let  you have this one. I'll just have to hope we get a  replacement in time."
So that was it - my third camera in a year. It looked and felt great, though the viewfinder was far from brilliant. With the big lens extended if  felt and looked  like a proper piece of pro kit. (Men with big lenses extended . . hm.)  I was really looking forward to giving it an exhaustive trial at the wonderful Leighton Moss reserve in Lancashire, near where Thelma and I were planning a short holiday. These are some of the pictures:

While the quality at the extreme range is surprisingly good (the crow) , the only way I could get really clear pictures was to get close - 10 metres or so. Birds in flight were quite a problem because the autofocus was not very fast.

Throughout my life I have learnt by doing. It's not the best way - far better to learn from someone else's mistakes - but it's what I do. I was not that happy with the pictures I was getting and a phrase from this blog kept going round in my head: http://mikeatkinson.net/Tutorial-3-Equipment.htm

"Make no mistake, if you're spending under £1000 on a bird photography lens and you don't buy the Canon 400mm f/5.6, you will regret it!"

So, finally I bit the bullet and followed his advice. I sold the Nikon P900 for only a little less than I paid for it, bought the Canon EOS 70D body and the 400mm lens. My first proper trial was at the Newport Wetlands. I'd stayed in the van near the hides and was able to get pictures in both evening and morning light, and it was just as the evening light was fading that I saw a group of godwits take to the air. With the high motor drive on, the speed set at 500th, aperture 5.6 I was amazed to find that the autofocus snapped onto the flock immediately:

This was the breakthrough. It's the fast autofocus and relative lightness which gives this lens the edge. There's no image stabilisation so you have to keep the shutter speed high when hand holding, and if the autofocus struggles you know the light is too poor. It has limitations, but for me it looks like the right compromise and I love using it. Thank you Mike Atkinson for good advice! I am now a fully paid up member of the Brotherhood of the Canonites and proud of it.

Here are some more pictures:

So, I've come a long way this year. The next  big challenge is to reduce my reliance on reserves and ready-made hides. I plan to do a study of the jackdaws in the village, the dippers on the river and red kites at the nest. That should keep me busy next year.

Anyone reading this - have a great Christmas!

The Pink-Foot Spectacular

12 December 2015

Snettisham

Having stayed the night as a guest of her majesty - not under restraint but in a caravan site on the Sandringham estate - I decided to drive home since the weather had deteriorated. However, I had seen  something about "pink-foot walks" which took place at Snettisham. The pink foot name has nothing to do with sore feet but relates to one of our less common wintering wild geese, the Pink Foot. Evidently at dawn, when the tide is high, you can see huge flocks of geese and waders taking to the air. With not much phone signal I was struggling to get the internet but managed to find out where Snettisham was -  only 10 miles away. Then with great difficulty I found the tide tables. High tide was at 7, and it was then 6am. First light would be around 7.20. The next thing was to find the weather forecast, but I just could not get the right page to load on my phone. Expecting rain, I was prepared to give up the whole idea when a thought struck:

"Hang on you prat. Why not look out of the door!"

I did and saw a clear sky just beginning to lighten a little, but still showing a few stars. The rain would no doubt come later. I had time for a  warming breakfast of porridge and coffee on a rough lay-bye just before the RSPB car park, which was barred to high vehicles. It was 300 metres to the car park and as I loaded up camera, binoculars and the other bits like phone and spare batteries, there was just enough light to see the path. It turned out to be a 1.5km walk from there to the first hide, but that was OK - it already felt like an adventure, and I welcomed the exercise in the cold morning air.  After what seemed like a long time skirting various fishing lakes, the path climbed up the side of  a dyke and I looked forward to a view of the Wash or at least an expanse of salt-marsh. What I saw brought me down to earth with a bump. There, right in front of me, was a caravan park. On and on went the path through the caravans, round more lakes - former gravel diggings for the air-fields of the last war, now brackish lagoons, littered with broken concrete and decorated with a row of small houses in all sorts of styles. Clearly this part of the reserve was not one of the stunning  wild places so beloved of the writers of RSPB leaflets.

Eventually I got to the shingle beach. The sun was beginning to rise behind me and in front was the vast expanse of water, mud and sand which is the Wash. Already swans and a few geese were flying over and way out over the sand I could see flocks of waders shining suddenly as they all turned together. There was a group of people up ahead and I guessed they were on the "pink-foot walk". We all stood looking out to sea and listening to the soundscape of bird calls.

Then something happened. Away to the west a black cloud rose. Moving like a flowing liquid it spread  up and out across the water. As it moved we began to hear the most extraordinary sound. It was sibilant, continuous, like a giant miles away slowly breathing out; like an endless wave breaking along an endless shore, and within it were faintly musical tones.

This was obviously a flock of birds and was making the sort of looping and swirling shapes made famous by the great starling roosts in the cities. This flock was not starlings, but a much bigger bird  - countless thousands of Pink Footed Geese. The flock was moving rapidly towards us and as it came, the mass dissolved into skeins - hundreds of interlocking and ever changing V formations. The noise grew but was never loud - you felt the geese were not shouting, but murmuring to each other. They flew over our heads and made towards the growing light in the east - on their way to feed on sugar beet tops  provided for them by benevolent farmers, who get help to compensate for the damage they do.

Thank you geese and friendly farmers  for a spectacle I will never forget. The tedious prospect of the long drive home was lifted.

Breckland to Birdland

11 December 2015

Just before you get to Downham Market the flat lands give way to a much more natural looking landscape - The Brecks. This is the top end of a  400 square mile area of sandy and chalky soil spanning Norfolk and Suffolk. It's the driest part of Britain (one of the reasons I'm here), the most flinty and it has the biggest lowland forest at Thetford. Brecks were temporary fields in soil too unfertile to grow crops every year. The area was once a veritable rabbit factory with dozens of guarded warrens sending up to 20,000 rabbits each to market for meat,  and supporting a fur industry.

Much of the old heathland has been "improved" of course with commercial forests and arable farming, but this northern part is an undulating mix of pine trees and small fields. Most of the old houses in north Norfolk seem to be made of round flints set in frames of mellow brick. Clearly the planning authorities insist on this vernacular style for new buildings too:

The grandeur of the church in the little village of Cley suggests a long history of prosperity, perhaps partly based on wind power:

Fascinating though it is I'm not here for the history. This trip is strictly for the birds, and Cley is Birdland Central - the legendary heartland of the twitcher, the place with a longer list of rarities than anywhere else except possibly the next village along the coast - or the next. Cley Marshes nature reserve dates back to 1926 and was the blueprint for many later establishments.

I spent the afternoon and the next morning on the reserve, mostly standing or sitting in hides, festooned with optical  gear, and waiting. At the most distant hide late in the afternoon - that's 3pm at this time of year - I met Carl Chapman, one of those fortunate people who make a living from nature watching. He told me where to find a bird I hardly knew existed - a red-necked grebe. I said I wasn't really a twitcher  - "Ah, no it's not just for the sake of seeing it, but it is easy to photograph - just hangs around the harbour at Brancaster Staithe."  He mentioned a rough-legged buzzard too, but I was not confident I would be able to identify that one. There was little to see from the hide but we had an interesting conversation before it became too gloomy. He runs wildlife tours and has a blog about Norfolk birds.

There were plenty of Marsh Harriers patrolling up and down, but none came near enough to improve on the pictures I took the day before:

I decided to come back at first light  (8am) the next day. It was dull and cold. An occasional harrier would be seen in the distance but the only break in a long 2 hours was when a flock of Brent Geese flew over.

I'd had enough of Cley so decided to go to the RSPB reserve at Titchwell. The road went through Brancaster Staithe so I drove down to the harbour to see if the grebe was there. The man with the tripod and telescope had to be a bird man so I asked him if the grebe was there.

"Oh yes, just over there - but it's just dived."

I went back to the van, got the camera and tripod out and set up near where he was. Bird watchers don't attract much curiosity round here - they're part of the scenery. I focus on the patch of water where the grebe went down and hey presto - there is it, bang in my sights. Because my lens has no image stabilisation I usually have it set on 1/500 second to freeze most of the movement, but with a tripod I can try at lower speed. I also fit the x1.4 extender to the lens which gives it a bit more reach but on a gloomy day also cuts down the amount of light reaching the sensor. With the bird too far away and with poor light none of the images I take are really clear, but for the record this undistinguished looking creature is the rare Red Necked Grebe - in its drab winter colours:

 

The only other rarity I saw  was a Water Pipet which had turned up at Titchwell Marsh, further north-west along the coast. There was a small group looking intently across a lagoon when I arrived at the screen. I asked them what was there - "The Water Pipet - here have a look." I peered through the telescope and there was a little bird a long way off looking just like any other pipet. I had to try and photograph it but by the time I got the tripod assembled it had disappeared and I missed a nice shot of a godwit in flight. Lesson - it's a good picture I'm after whatever the subject may be. Rarities are only of interest to me if they are in their natural habitat.

Welney

9 December 2015
"In 1630, King Charles I granted a drainage charter to the 4th Earl of Bedford who engaged the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden to construct the two Bedford rivers. The purpose of the new rivers was to facilitate drainage of the Great Ouse between Earith and Downham Market. The area between the rivers is 20 miles (32 km) long and almost a mile wide and acts as washland, i.e. a floodplain during the winter and, increasingly, also in summer. When they are flooded this causes a 30-mile (48 km) detour for local residents."

With the sat-nav behaving it takes about an hour to get to the Ouse Washes. The road through the little village of Welney is a succession of right-angle  bends to the north of the Old Bedford river. It then finds its way through the wetlands between the two great canals, crosses the New Bedford river and the "hundred foot bank", turns sharply left and runs parallel to the bank until it reaches the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust reserve.

There are beautiful low-level lights at regular intervals round the car park, and in the  visitor centre the lights are on. I am reminded again how wealthy this organisation is. Peter Scott would not recognise the trust which he began from a cottage at Slimbridge seventy years ago. It is all designer-experience - sleek wood cladding, curves, spotlights, murals of nature looking so much more appealing than the bleak flat landscape around.  The doors are open so he walks in past an empty foyer, an unmanned welcome desk and only the distant voices of the cleaners.

I am parked up in a lay-by a few hundred metres from the wetland centre, decide this is OK for the night, and  go round locking all the doors. The curtains and blinds are down, carefully placed led lighting on and the heater humming as it blows warm air onto my cold feet.  My  meal will be a one-pan special - celery, broccoli, a little rice, and some chunky pieces of very tasty chorizo sausage with a couple of glasses of red wine . The evening is spent with real coffee, the computer, a second reading Atonement by Ian McEwan, and a long session deleting photographs and processing the chosen few.

10 December 2015

As the daylight slowly grows I hear the magical sound of hundreds of whooper swans flying over to a field half a mile away where they are landing to feed. The reserve doesn't open until 10 so I decide to go for a walk along the bank. As soon as I reach the top I can see that there is plenty of water here and lots of birds too, but my attention is focussed on a flock of sheep grazing on this very long, very narrow and very steep field. Will I be able to creep past them if I go down to the fence? At first it looks as if they will do the sensible thing and let me past, but no, as always with these infuriating creatures they run on ahead.

By the time I decide to return to the van I have driven them half a mile from where they wanted to be. More fools they.

At 10 I show my membership card and ask why they open so late. The WWT headquarters at Slimbridge allows us in at 8.15. It seems the staff work until 8 in the evening, the last hour being a floodlit swan feeding spectacular. I must have missed it last night. Anyway, it's a good bright but cool and windy day with lots of lovely birds including this Marsh Harrier with the godwits pretending to be frightened by it:

I also love getting more intimate pictures of the smaller birds like these goldfinches feeding on teasels:

Fenland

9 December 2015
I am heading for the Nene and Ouse Washes in the Great Level. This is how Wikipedia describes it:

"The Great Level of the Fens is the largest region of fen in eastern England: including the lower drainage basins of the River Nene and the Great Ouse, it covers about 500 sq mi (1,300 km2). It is also known as the Bedford Level, after Francis Russell, 4th Earl of Bedford, who headed the so-called adventurers (investors) in the 17th-century drainage in this area; his son became the first governor of the Bedford Level Corporation."

The trucks have gone and in their place are other huge machines - vegetable harvesters, diggers, tractors with trailers piled high with root crops. The roads are ruled across a dead flat  landscape of black earth and huge arable fields. They progress in sharp right-angle bends to the next straight. It is a cold clear night in December, and with no town near, and a crescent moon,  the stars seem closer. I drive for 5 or 6 miles in a line so straight that the wheel could be locked in position if it were not for the humps and troughs where shrinking peat has bucked the edges of the road.

I am heading for a place called Eldernell. Here is Wikipedia again:

"The Nene Washes are a Special Protection Area along the River Nene in the English county of Cambridgeshire. They consist of a number of washlands such as Whittlesey Wash or Guyhirn Wash, which can be deliberately flooded to protect settlements or more important farmland when the river is high.
They extend for around 21 kilometres (13 mi) east of the City of Peterborough and cover more than 15 square kilometres (3,700 acres). The washes are significant for their over-wintering populations of Bewick's swan (Cygnus columbianus bewickii) and pintail (Anas acuta).
The RSPB owns and manages 500 hectares (1,200 acres) of the Nene Washes.,with public access at Eldernell."

The GPS on my phone doesn't seem to understand how to navigate in these parts and when I finally  get to the end of a narrow lane and the tiny hamlet of Eldernel I find a giant digger slowly being unloaded from a truck which completely fills the road. There is nothing to be done but wait. It's around 15:00 and the light is beginning to fade. At last the low-bed truck moves on and I get to the little car park where the RSPB has a notice board. There are a couple of other cars there as well as the low-loader who is signalling to me to move so that he can reverse and turn round. I look out at the promised land of swans and ducks and see nothing but farmed grassland - and surprisingly dry grassland. Clearly the big rains have not got this far east. It's the floods which bring the birds.
 There is a youngish man with a big lens so I ask him what is to be seen:
"Oh, there's very often a short eared owl, but not today."
"Is it too late now?"
"No, it might be worth waiting a while, but the light's no good for pictures, so I'm off now."
It's been a long drive so I put the boots on and go for a brisk walk along the dead straight line of the dike. There is very little of anything to be seen. This is the kind of place that nobody comes to after dark so potentially good to park up for the night. I could be here at dawn, but the wash is not flooded, it's still barely four o'clock so in the end I decide to drive on to Welney and the Ouse washes.

Truckland

8 December 2015

I'm on my way to Norfolk to do some serious bird watching and photography. Does this make me a "birder"? Is a birder the same sort of thing as a sniper, a  mouser, ratter, harrier, wildfowler, courser, rabbiter? We say of a cat that she's a good mouser, or a dog is a good terrier,  ratter or rabbiter. A sniper shoots snipe (and by extension any difficult target). Terriers terrify, harriers and  coursers chase hares and wildfowlers shoot wildfowl. The object of the word always seems to come off worst, but the worst we birders do to birds - and this is not trivial - is to disturb them. We do shoot them, but with our cameras, not with guns. There are all sorts of reasons why we are fascinated by birds. The most visible of our wildlife, we love how they look. We love to have them near us, to tame and master them. In the same way that a passion for football is a sublimation of our tribal  warrior instincts, so stalking and photographing birds is for the hunter within us. I freely admit to the latter, and I am heading for my hunting ground.
As I drive past Kettering I am not quite in the geographic centre of England, but between the two north-south arteries of the M1 and the A1M I am crossing the distribution centre of Britain. This is truckland where long lines of massive container trucks mark out the big roads and the huge flat fields grow gigantic sheds, interspersed with non-descript arable crops  . These are the warehouses of the big companies who sell us all our stuff, who service our insatiable appetite for goodies, things, gadgets, white goods. The trucks bring the containers from the big container ports; the goods are unloaded at the warehouses, sorted according to dispatch priorities and then taken by more huge lorries out to all the towns and out-of-town shopping centres, but more and more to the regional distribution centres where they will be taken by an ever- growing fleet of white vans to our homes.
I have good reason to hate this country. It is where my first attempt at serious manufacturing hit the rocks. The biggest customer of the doomed debt laden business of  "Turners' Chairs" was in Kettering. We made the arms for one of their lines of settees. They went bankrupt leaving us with a debt of £1200. It doesn't sound much now, but in the late seventies it was fatal.
Even if  had no prejudice I would find little to enjoy in the dreary landscape, until I get to Peterborough which calls itself "Heritage City - Environment City - Event City" and uses this logo to show how central it is, at least to England and Wales.

I dare say it is a beautiful and exciting city - certainly the cathedral looks good from the by-pass - but I am heading for another flat landscape, because by an accident of history, a massive engineering project in the 17th Century