I haven't posted here for quite sometime now. To be honest I haven't had much time to get out with the camera but thought I'd share with you these shots and the story that accompanies them which I still can't quite believe happened yesterday. I've been away for most of the summer and the water feature that runs the length of my house has been neglected and quite chocked with blanket weed. I've spent most of last week slowly removing the bulk of it with a garden rake. Yesterday morning i was removing some final bits with a children's fishing net, the sort you can buy at the beach for rock-pooling etc. The handle of the net is a bamboo cane about 5 feet in length. As I was slowly sweeping the net in the water to pick out the blanket weed I heard the shrill piping of a kingfisher which shot in from nowhere and landed on the handle of the net! As you can imaging to say i was gobsmacked would be an understatement. Here I was bent over the pond with net in hand and a Kingfisher perched at most 2 feet from my right hand looking at me. It stayed not he handle for about 20 seconds with me and it just looking at w=each other before flying up onto the handrail of a bridge that crosses the water feature and then into a yew tree next to the pond. Stunned I went inside to tell my wife what had just happened. The Kingfisher then came back down from the yew tree onto the handrail of the bridge and spend the next 10 mins or so repeatedly diving for sticklebacks (hundred of 3 spines in the pond). She used the handrail of the bridge, top of a water fountain and sides fit eh pond for perches. I've attached a few pics of her that were shot through quite dirty double glazed windows at q=uite horrible angles. The pics are quite noisy as the ISO was bumped up to 2500 in some instances to keep the shutter speed up. A garden tick I never expected to get but for me the best part was seeing her so close perched on the handle of the net I was actually using at the time.
Andrew
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Andrew
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