This Weeks Roundup
Despite doing a number of long (by my current standards) walks this week, most of them weren't photographically very productive. A trip to Birkacre did provide a good variety of bird shots and I also had a lengthy encounter with the Buzzards by the canal that, as always, has me yearning for a longer lens and probably someone to carry it for me too.
All bird pictures taken with Nikon Z8 and Nikkor 100-400 f/4.5-5.6 except where noted otherwise.
After circling high above me for what seemed like an eternity to my neck (probably about 10 minutes), the birds began to lose altitude. They didn't do this gradually though. The technique seemed to be to briefly tuck their wings in and dive at breakneck speed before stretching them out again and circling for a bit before taking another dive. Fast, but nowhere near as fast as Kestrels can manage, those things practically teleport from one location to another when they do this sort of thing (at least from the perspective of your humble photographer wondering why it's just seemingly vanished).


Eventually, they dropped to a low level and, one by one disappeared into the trees. The actual landing in the trees looked really ungainly, a bit of a compromise between gliding in as gently as possible while tucking wings out of the way to not clip the trees during the process and unfortunately the full sequence was marred by many out of focus shots, but at least a couple were acceptable.

One final shot of the second Buzzard after it landed in the tree relatively close to me. This is the one with a big hole in its left wing.
