Potteric Carr

I suddenly found myself with nothing to do on Monday Afternoon, so I headed for Potteric Carr. I headed for Low Ellers first, where there was supposed to be a couple of Pintail. It took a while to locate them but I found them on the near side of the lake. They were a couple of striking males (see pictures below). I tried to get some pictures with the camera phone and scope, as I have done before, but the results were poor. Then I suddenly wondered what the results would be like if I held the Fuji S5000 to the scope’s eye piece. Amazingly this is something I had never though of doing before, despite plenty of experience with Dads digiscoping set up. The results were good, bearing in mind that this was the first time I had tried this and the light was pretty awful.

Male Pintail – taken with a Fuji S5000 ‘hand held’ to the back of my Kowa TSN1 scope

Male Pintail (cropped and edited in Photoshop) – taken with a Fuji S5000 ‘hand held’ to the back of my Kowa TSN1 scope

After a while at Low Ellers hide I headed for the visitors centre and Willow Marsh.

There had been sightings of a Bittern from Beaston Hide, but luck was not with me today…so I spent sometime looking at the feeders, where I got the pictures of the Greater Spotted woodpecker and Jay…and a final digiscope picture of one of 8 Reed Buntings feeding on the floor around the feeders.

Female Greater Spotted Woodpecker – taken with a Fuji S5000

Jay – taken with a Fuji S5000

Male Reed Buntimng – taken with a Fuji S5000 ‘hand held’ to the back of my Kowa TSN1 scope