After waking late with a fairly debilitating hangover, we dragged ourselves up and saw the sun was shining as forecast. So, in the hope that fresh winter air would help us forget the after-effects of a night on the cider, we packed up the tea flasks, camera gear and hot soup and headed out to Rais. The colours are really starting to return now, the mud is gradually being replaced with new green grass and shoots and the buds are forming fast on the trees.
I put up a tit nest box, filled all the usual feeders and then attached a second camo net to the bird-of-prey hide and a black shower curtain to the inside which pretty much makes it a usable, albeit temporary, hide. I baited it with some leftover cooked pasta and a boiled egg and will leave it alone again now for a couple of weeks to let the birds get used to the sound it makes as it flaps in the wind - and boy was it windy today. The wind definitely helped blow away the headache as well as keep Ant's Rhodie fire burning strong. The first hide which I shall call the camp hide had weathered the wind pretty well and for the first time I did not have to remove water from the roof - I'm pretty sure it has rained since last weekend so with any luck it means the new layout of the roof has worked a treat.
After some hot soup and a quick break I headed up to the fire to help Ant break and burn the remainder of the cut Rhodies - I was starting to feel a whole lot better, but Ant seemed to be fading fast. Mum and Jon arrived to scavenge some seasoned wood from the various log piles to use on his new lathe - it's good to know the wayleave clearance wood won't just be burned or left to rot, but turned into something usable. Can't wait to see what he does with them.
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| Holly tree on the northern border |
As soon as the last cut Rhodies were in the flames I took the Nikon on a wander to test the hand held vibration reduction. With only a long lens to play with it was a little tricky to find subjects through the trees that didn't have obstructions or white backgrounds, but I did manage to find some jet black jelly fungus on a mossy log as well as this bracket fungi on a young birch log. Trouble was I had the ISO set on auto without a sensible range restriction, so it was a while before I realised I was shooting with a stupidly high ISO and introducing a load of unwanted image noise - so much for testing the VR capability. D'oh!
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| dead trunk starfish! |
