Category: Photography

The call of a cryptic Bittern hidden in a reedbed is one of the most evocative sounds of nature at this time of year. The sound is known as booming, but it’s more like the sound of someone blowing across the top of an empty drinks bottle. Earlier in the season, the frisky males started warming up with some guttural grunts, progressing to the full bottle when they sense the females might be receptive.

If you were out and about in the fens not twenty years ago, chances of hearing a booming Bittern were very low as the bird was all-but extinct in England. Habitat creation and other conservation efforts have led to a resurgence. So, most walks we take at this time of year among our fenland reserves, many of which are essentially repurposed and planted gravel pits, will reward us with a few booms and an occasional flypast.

I was walking at RSPB Berry Fen this morning. I’d picked up a whole lot of different warblers – Chiff Chaff, Reed Warbler, Whitethroat, Lesser Whitethroat, Blackcap, and Garden Warbler [What’s a warbler, anyway? Ed.] and a few Great White Egret, Little Egret, and Grey Heron as well as the usual ducks, crows, gulls, and cormorants. I was at the most northerly part of the fen close to one of those repurposed gravel pits known as Barleycroft Lake (part of RSPB Ouse Fen) and just about to head into the lake area when a male Bittern, appeared, flying low from the lake area. You can tell it’s a male from the pale blue marking on the lores. In ornithology, the lore is the patch between eye and bill on the side of a bird’s head. It’s usually featherless and sometimes coloured, as is the case with male Bitterns.

There are reeds on the edge of that lake, so presumably that’s this male’s usual patch, but it flew out over the dry edge of Berry Fen, sortied a rather brief reconnaissance flight, turned tail, presumably when it realised there was no reedy cover when it saw me and quickly, flew back into the lake area. Luckily, I had a few seconds of its U-turn to grab a few snapshots as it flew past silently. No sonic boom.

The bittern, Botaurus stellaris, is grouped with the herons, storks, and ibises, but obviously most closely resembles a heron than a stork or ibis.

Today, we got to a local site about 20 minutes after the pair of Peregrine Falcons that live there had gone off hunting…at least according to one birder who was leaving as we arrived. We trekked on and awaited the raptors’ return and in the meantime watched several Red Kite, some Common Buzzard, and a couple of nesting Kestrels.

The Peregrines turned up about an hour later, preyless. They darted back to their nest site in the chalk cliff. Travelling fast, but not quite at their stooping speed which can be up to 200mph. One of the pair then zoomed off again to look for lunch, leaving the other to stare at us quizzically.

Peregrine basically means from abroad/foreign. In Latin per is away and egrine from agri meaning field, so “away field” = abroad. Perhaps it is suggestive of the bird somehow being a wanderer, the etymology is unclear.

Falcon comes from Latin falcis, meaning curved blade/war sickle, and may allude to the curved beak, the talons, or the wing profile…again, the etymology is somewhat lost in the history of falconry.

There was almost no photographic light left in the sky after sunet last night, but a Barn Owl flew past and I really just had to grab a shot even though I was just about to head home. My Canon R7 set to auto-ISO jumped to 20000, which is very high so the photo was very noisy/grainy. I usually denoise my images with DxO PureRaw 4 and for this one it had to be done. PureRaw drops the ISO by about three stops, so that’s as if the camera had been shooting at ISO 2500.

For those interested in such things, ISO ain’t what it used to be as I mentioned before. For film cameras, ISO was a measure of the sensitivity of the film. You used to use a higher ISO if you were shooting in lower light conditions.

For a digital camera, there’s no way to change the sensitivity of the sensor. So, adjusting the ISO does nothing more than turn up the brightness of the image you’ve captured and this brightness control is then embedded into the photo you download from the camera.

At lower light levels, your camera needs to turn up the brightness for the same shutter speed and aperture (f-stop) to get the exposure level you want. This means the noise is turned up brighter too, commonly seen as a purple speckles throughout the darker areas of the photo, but also impinging to different degrees across the whole image.

Now, the noise in a film photo is often referred to as grain (because it’s associated with the grain size of the particles of light-sensitive silver compounds in the film itself) It’s often seen as moody, romantic, and evocative, especially in noir Hollywood photos or the celebrity portrait work of David Bailey etc et cetera. It can be pleasing, just like the crackles and pops of classic vinyl…ish.

But, for digital photos, noise is just noise. It’s not grain, it’s not really romantic, nor evocative, it detracts and distorts the detail in your photo. So anything you can do to keep the ISO as low as possible and any processing that removes the noise without removing detail is, to my eye, a good thing. There are limits, but as regular viewers will know I almost always use DxO PureRaw to do the basic pre-edit processing of my photos. It essentially turns down the digital ISO control by three “stops” but without lowering the brightness.

The Barn Owl was shot at ISO 20000, so DxO is effectively bringing that down to ISO 2500, which is still way too high for a clean photo. But, it beats the RAW image straight out of the camera.

Incidentally, all this pre-processing and processing, is basically the digital equivalent of developing the film and printing from the negative as you would do with film. Some people imagine it’s somehow cheating because there are a lot more options allowing you to adjust levels and other stuff when you process digital negatives (the camera RAW) file, but it’s worth looking at the history of film photography to see how that nothing has changed fundamentally. Photography is not reality, it has always been about capturing a moment in time and developing it in such a way as to make that moment special after the event.

It’s quite some time since we last visited Paxton Pits Nature Reserve in Cambridgeshire, well before the covid pandemic, March 2019, in fact, if my photo archive dates are to be believed and before that January 2018. Tempus fugit, as they say. And, speaking of things that fly and sound a bit Latin, there were plenty of Regulus regulus among the fir trees not far from the site’s visitor centre.

The nature reserve is, like so many of our local sites gravel pits that have been turned over in whole or in part to nature. It saves the aggregate companies having to back-fill once they have excavated all the millions of tons of sand and gravel they need and gives nature a chance to thrive in areas that would otherwise be turned back into unused flatland. The Paxton reserve was, until World War II, largely farmland on the edge of the village of Little Paxton. The gravel excavations were started during the war. There is still activity, but a large area is now lakes for wildlife, trails, and some lakes for fishing and boating activities.

Not far from the visitor centre was the site of the former farmhouse. The historical sign there tells visitors about the farmhouse that once stood on this spot and about the provenance of the row of quite tall fir trees that stand in front of where the farmhouse once was. Apparently, they were Christmas trees! They have now grown so tall that you’d need the longest of long ladders to put the fairy on the top and hang your baubles.

Anyway, it was among these fir trees that numerous R. regulus were darting about. Readers that are regulus as clockwork will know that this species is the UK’s joint smallest bird, the Goldcrest, as I’ve mentioned it before. Its equally diminutive partner is the slightly less common but equally tiny Firecrest.

A fellow photographer, who turned out to be on the reserve’s bird-ringing team, pointed out that the Goldcrests we were photographing were probably winter visitors from Scandinavia enjoying the slightly warmer climate of East Anglia and the rich pickings to be had on a sunny January day among the fir trees. She wasn’t entirely certain, but seemed to imply that there aren’t usually any in this location during the summer months although she had witnessed nesting in one of the Xmas trees previously.

Goldcrest are so small, so fast moving, and often spend their time in the depths of the needles of fir trees, that it is commonly rather difficult to get a good snap in sunlight. If you’re hearing isn’t shot, you can usually pick up their very high-pitched hissy tweets. However, the Scandinavians were rather obliging today and at least I got a couple of nice shots of these delightful creatures with their golden crests.

A Kestrel for a Knave was a book by Barry Hines published in 1968. It was adapted for the Ken Loach film Kes.

The protagonist, Billy Casper, was played by actor David Bradley who later had to adopt the stage name Dai Bradley, because there was already an EQUITY member, the RSC actor David Bradley. You may know the latter from many a TV drama, as unintelligible Arthur Webley in Hot Fuzz, as Filch in the Harry Potter films, as the first Doctor in Doctor Who and as William Hartnell in An Adventure in Space and Time, and Walder Frey from Game of Thrones, etc…I met him once, I mentioned it before.

As for Dai Bradley, he was also in the film Zulu Dawn, a couple of other films and various TV parts.

When the book was reprinted after Kes the film, they used the infamous scene of Billy sticking two fingers up for the cover…I grew up with this book…I was infamous by proxy as a child.

First trip of the year to the Suffolk Wildlife Trust nature reserve known as Lackford Lakes. 2nd January 2025, glorious sunny day, first such of the year and the first for quite some time.

Having seen four raptors on the journey there – Buzzard, Kestrel, Sparrowhawk, Red Kite – a trek through the reserve to see what we could see then gave us:

There was also a very odd looking bird being harried by a Blackbird in a tree. It was probably a juvenile Blackbird, but it seemed to have a rufous bib and a very pale, speckled breast for a brief second I imagined it might be an Asian vagrant in the form of a Red-throated Thrush. But, very, very doubtful.

2nd January 2025 was also our first outdoor picnic of the year! Is an indoor picnic an oxymoron?