2017 My Birding Year: Catching Up and the Isle of May

In terms of getting to the 200 birds for the year there is not a great deal to report from the last two weeks. Only two birds to add. A Little Stint seen at Cairnbulg on / /17. and a Great Skua seen today from Kinnaird Head, Fraserburgh. The Great Skua was too far away for a photo

Little Stint

That's not to say I haven't been out and about finding and photographing birds, just that the ones I have found and photographed I have already seen this year. Although I have to say that with things like a General Election in the UK, the youngest offspring visiting, a common cold and the weather I have not been out and about as much as I would have liked.

Here is a handful of photos that I have taken

Great Spotted Woodpecker in a Neighbours Garden

Brown Hare caught on a Morning Walk

Sand Martin collecting Mud to Build a Nest

Yellowhammer

Song Thrush

Tree Creeper


Common Tern

Wren

The big trip of the last two weeks has to be Thursdays outing to the Isle of May National Nature Reserve in the Firth of Forth.

Five of us from the NE Scotland branch of the Scottish Ornithologists Club left Aberdeen at 7.00am to get the 9.30 sailing from Anstruther to the Isle of May. That meant I had to leave home before six to make sure I was in Aberdeen on time. All these birding trips seem to involve getting up a Silly o' Clock!

The boat, the May Princess was packed with a hundred people wanting to visit this magical island. Most were going for the natural history of the island. We were told on the crossing it was home to 46,000 Puffins. Many of the passengers were armed, like me, with cameras as well as binoculars. Needless to say I was 'out lensed' by many of them. Other passengers were there for the rich Human History of the island.

Puffin

Once off the boat we were given a briefing by the Scottish Natural Heritage site manager. He told us a bit about the job that they were doing on the island but mainly he told us to keep to the paths. There were so many Puffins on the island that is was all too easy to step onto on of their nesting burrows potentially doing yourself some damage but more importantly possibly harming a Puffin or its young in the burrow. His second piece of advice was to wear a hat or some other head covering. The reason for this became obvious when we walked from the jetty to the visitors centre. On either side of the path there were nesting Arctic Terns. Despite the fact that everyday during their breeding season a hundred or so people take that path and don't do them any harm they insist on vigorously defending their nest and its contents. This involves them in dive bombing and striking nasty blows on the visitors heads with their hard and pointy beaks. Some go the extra mile and defecate, with precision on the intruders. They do all this while making a lot of noise, initially a loud clicking noise of warning then ringing and rattling noise of the attack. The only way to warn them off is by waving a stick or even an arm above your head. Though this, I know to my cost does not stop the dedicated defecating Tern.

Coming in for the Kill

Arctic Terns on the Attack

The staple food for the birds of May is Sand Eels. The Terns take then one at a time

Arctic Tern with a Sand Eel

The Puffins take a bigger beak full

Puffin with Sand Eels

The other birds on the island don't show off their catch. Puffins in particular are great show offs. Clearly they are aware that the black and white plumage topped with the colourful bill and large overly made up eyes are eye catching at the same time as being slightly comical. They are obviously proud of their ability to hold lots of sand eels in that gaudy beak. All the birds I know collect food for their chicks, some like the Thrushes and Blackbirds can do the same trick as the Puffins and hold many prey items at once, but then immediately take the food the their nest and fed the chicks. Not the Puffins. They stand around on the cliff tops for ages before taking the food down the burrow for the chick, (they are called Pufflings). This gives the photographer plenty time to get the perfect pose.

Not this one. Wings are a little awkward

Better but still not right

What about one without showing the wings. Background is a little fussy.

This one might do

This is the one

Getting a shot of a Puffin in flight with Sand Eels is a different matter. One of a puffin in flight is not too difficult.

This one has Sand Eels but is not sharp

Add caption

This one is better but could be better still.

The shot I didn't get was the classic one of a Puffin coming towards the camera just about to land so its undercarriage (feet) is down and with a beak of Sand Eels. I did try but they were all out of focus. The bird is coming forward quicker than the auto focus. The only way I can think of to get the shot is to have a camera with a high burst rate. Mine at 6 frames a second is too slow. There must be good light so you can get a fast shutter speed in order to freeze the movement but still have a low ISO to maintain picture quality and get a decent depth of field to ensure all of the bird is sharp. The image above had a shutter speed of 1/1600 of a second and the wings are still blurred. You have got to be sure where the bird is going to land so you can set up the camera on a tripod and pre-focus then using a remote shutter get the burst of images as it flies towards the camera. Hopefully one of the shots will be in focus, if not repeat the process. Finding the right spot for this may be tricky. The Puffins land into the wind and from what I saw onto a cliff top that already has Puffins making it difficult to separate subject bird from the rest. Here are a couple of my attempts at that classic shot.

Some of the same problems occur when trying to photograph the Terns in flight. Stationary Terns don't present to much of a problem. Getting the eye to standout from their black cap needs to be addressed.

Arctic Tern

In flight it is different. Their flight path is much less predictable than the Puffins and above your head so using a tripod is not really an option. As with Puffins the classic shot is one with the bird coming towards you, but in attack mode rather than with food. Whether it was my preference or the birds behaviour I don't know but most of my shots have the sun behind the bird. This produces dark shadows. While these can be lifted in Lightroom (other imaging software is available) I did wonder whether fill-in flash would have been useful or even ethically the right thing to do. Generally I am not in favour of using flash for wildlife photography.

With only just over two hours on the island and this being my first time. There was not enough time to work out all the solutions, even if I had taken all my gear. The other option for photographing these birds was to go for the comic....

Puffins on top of a Bird Watching Hide

'Peek a Boo' Puffin

.....or the experimental

Arctic Terns en mass. Taken with a slow shutter speed 1/10th sec. and panned

One well known bird/natural history photographer was staying on the island as a volunteer at the Isle of May Bird Observatory. He would have been able to find time to get things right.

While the flatter parts of the island was taken up with Puffins, Terns and Gulls the cliffs held different species. Here are a few of them