Birds

I vaguely remember blogging about me not twitching anymore… In fact, I rarely photographed birds in the Netherlands anymore. Well, somehow things changed. Last year one day of twitching on Vlieland and this month the Iceland Gull and now this Dipper. I think it has something to do with my new equipment. The 300mm f/2.8 in combination with the 1D mark IV is a really great combination for bird photography of course.

Dipper

Dippers are always interesting birds. They sit nervously at the waterside, to jump forward and swim a for a while, suddenly diving under to come up a little later with some small insect. Often they are not very shy, so they are easy to photograph. The only problem is that we hardly have any nice natural fast flowing water in the Netherlands where they can sit and feed. This dipper had found a small canal with some small weirs. For the Dipper this was enough to feel at home. He hardly seemed to notice the small crowd of bird watchers and photographers nearby. Sometimes he even started to sing softly. I think he knew that it wouldn’t be heard anyhow, as it was only very soft.

Despite my preference for a bit wider shots, showing some of the landscape around the bird, I decided to go for this close up this time. The landscape was very artificial and ugly, so the picture didn’t get much better if I would have included it. Even the branch it’s sitting on was placed by fellow photographers (I think a stone would have been better). The blue in the background is the small waterfall caused by the weir.

On my website you can see more pictures of this bird.