Arrived at Rais around noon to beautiful sunshine. I was armed with my new Nikon D4 and a fixed 500mm lens to try out and accompanied by my sister for her first ever session with a camera in a hide. We had gardening "kneely" pads to sit on (last week's soggy numb and frozen bum was just never to be repeated), a bean bag for one lens and a tripod for mine - the Nikon is way heavier than anything I have ever used before.
On the way in I collected the Acorn trail camera from the path which had this gorgeous fox on it and not a lot else but I think I had the angle wrong on the tree I had tied it to because there were tons of images of nothing so I'm guessing the sensors tripped but the animals passed by either underneath or along the path which is further to the left out of frame!
After the obligatory brew on arrival we filled the feeders and settled ourselves in for a bit of a wait as the feeders were completely empty having not been filled since last Sunday. It actually didn't take too long before the first wave of tits came through - the Greats, followed by the Coals and then finally the Blues. Unfortunately the log feeder on the ground was too close for me and my hired whopper lens, so I switched to helping my sister get to grips with focusing and composition; a very frustrating couple of hours passed as she watched the birds come and go in all the spots apart from the one she was focused on! so typical - I remember it well. She did eventually capture an image she was pleased with and hopefully it will spur her on to keep practicing. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do - birds are small, fast and constantly on the move and the bigger birds are far more nervous and don't tend to come as close or as often.
The woodpeckers came in close again but remained on the backside of the tree trunk in front of us, so will try baiting slightly differently tomorrow.
The first sack of bird seed (25kgs) is nearly done now and so I will need to order some more, but the peanuts are definitely the favourite, which fits with the BBC's "Winterwatch" experiment this week where they put out different foods (cheese, peanuts and grapes) and the mice always chose the one with the highest calorific content - the peanuts. Calories definitely needed in this cold weather.
My sister left shortly before 3pm which gave me some time to fire up the storm kettle and fill my flask with coffee to take back inside the hide for some silent Nikon practice with my homemade figgy flapjacks (there must be a domestic goddess in me somewhere), - however I wasn't alone for long, nor did I get to use the Nikon... it was the Samsung mobile phone that got the use as a woodmouse came scurrying in and had a good snoop about right in front of me! Can't wait til tomorrow when I will be back out with a shorter lens (80-400mm) and hopefully as I will be alone I will get to give the new kit a few good hours trial. I need to get to grips with the differences in controls before I head off to Kenya in 3 weeks - switching to Nikon after 15 years handling a Pentax is a real challenge for me.
