Another day…

 

POTD 05Jan11, originally uploaded by andyskelton – Happy New Year to you all.

.. another Nuthatch; actually it’s probably one of the pair that regularly visit our garden, but that makes for a more cumbersome heading.

On a short car journey this morning, with a rare clear radiant blue sky and an effervescent wintery sun making it’s appearance for once, I watched a Red Kite for several minutes soaring effortlessly through the skies. Illuminated perfectly by the brilliance of low January sunshine, I could have easily taken a couple of hundred photos of this bird as it glided close by. I think I’ve said before, there are times to photograph and there are times to enjoy the majestic spectacle that nature offers us, and this was one of those times, to simply enjoy the show.

We are lucky to have numerous red kite haunts close to where we live, though it was only a couple of decades ago when this was a very different story. The bird had been persecuted to near extinction levels in the UK with a sole breeding pair present in Wales. With a carefully  managed reintroduction, there are now between 1800 and 2000 breeding in the UK.  This work has been hailed as a huge success, and is being used as a template for other endangered species reintroductions in the UK.

Of all these schemes, I would love to visit Scotland where White Tailed Fish Eagles have been released back into the wild. These huge birds are certainly majestic enough to match the fantastic vistas in this northern country but what I’d really like to photgraph them doing is catching fish in the sea. It’s supposed to be pretty easy to set up but I’m not sure whether a small rowing boat will withstand the weight of the 600mm lens and I certainly don’t fancy photographing the bird sub aqua.

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