Kingfisher At Forest Farm

Today has been a good day!

For starters there wasn't a cloud in the sky when I got up, and then is not a cloud in the sky now, some twelve hours later ... do not adjust your eyes, but this used the be usual colour of the sky before it was replaced with slate grey. It's not going to last, cloudy tomorrow, rain and wintery showers by the weekend!

We had a visit by the RE-ACT people from RCT Scheme today. I get about a third of my wages paid as I am being trained as a bookkeeper in the new business. They seemed very pleased with what we are doing.

Staying on Business Support Centre Ltd, we picked up three new clients this year already! Two today! We are still in search for that elusive "big" client which will really push us on, but we love working with the small companies, as they are such characters with a passion for what they do!

We had decided to go to Forest Farm for a few hours this afternoon, but with the new client meeting we thought we wouldn't make it, but by 3 o'clock we had cleared the decks and popped down to catch the last hour of sunlight. I was so glad we did. We bumped into another guy who happened to have a Sony A77 slung around his neck like me, he said the Kingfisher was hanging around the hide. So opted to give it a go. Regular readers of this blip will know I have failed to get a Kingfisher shot down there, despite hours in that hide.

It was quiet at first, but then a male Sparrowhawk floated in and perched in the tree opposite, a bit to far way for me to get a proper shot, but he looked stunning in the setting sunlight. He spooked out a few Cetti Warblers out of the reed beds, and a a pair of Teal ventured around the fringes. And then there was a flash of blue, and the Kingfisher landed on a reed on the far side of the pond.

It really was on the limits of what I could take, hand-held, with a low enough ISO to stop being overly grainy, in the fading light. I managed half a dozen decent-ish shots of it, this being the best. As we waked around the rest of the reserve, we caught up with it by the canal, were we had a wonderful five minutes watching it fish. It even caught one, and we watched it stun it on a branch and eat it.

And to think, we almost didn't go!

As I said ... today has been a good day!