The gathering of European Bee-Eaters is getting larger each evening, they also woke me at sunrise this morning too!
Tonight they gave a great display of acrobatically feeding. There’s nothing better than capturing the moment they are going for a catch.
Here are 2 photos of the same catch. The first shows it lining up for the catch and the second shows the incredible acrobatics to catch the bee.
(Click to view in Lightbox)
It’s very common during the courting period that male European Bee-Eaters will catch and offer larger insects to his female, very romantic you may say. However, yesterday evening I witnessed something even more romantic and I’ve never seen it before……
The male arrived with a large Butterfly or Moth and when it was offered to his lady, they spend about 30 seconds tugging it, breaking it into two so that they both had an piece. It was no accident, it was obvious from the pulling that they wanted to share it. These stunning birds continue to amaze me! The photos aren’t great as the angle was a bit odd to the light.
I hosted a small private walk around Ludo this morning and one of the highlights was a Little Egret trying to swallow an Eel that it had caught. Every time it swallowed it, the Eel would wriggle back out. After 5 minutes of watching it, it managed to swallow it down.
Here is a photo I shot a few years back at Salgados of a Greater Flamingo standing amongst some warm rising fog. I came across it whilst clearing out some files, enjoy.
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Back in 2016 I spent quite a few cold early mornings and evenings with a pair of wintering Short Eared Owls in Derbyshire in the UK. Some of the time I spent was far too dark to get some good shots due to having to shoot at too high an ISO.
Back then I was shooting with the Nikon D810 which was and still is a great camera today (it’s currently my backup camera), but high ISO wasn’t fantastic. Today I invested in the DxO PureRAW standalone software which “cleans” RAW files up before processing. I have been using DxO PhotoLab for sometime, however, I was only using it for it’s denoise capabilities and therefore PureRAW is a better fit.
So, I chose the following photograph to test the capabilities. My biggest issue with a lot of denoise software is that it makes the background unpleasing and detracts the viewer’s eye from where you are trying to force them to look, however, DxO PureRAW really makes a good job of the background.
I’m no mouthpiece for DxO, in fact, I had some words of dissapointment with them recently over the upgrade path of their PhotoLab software, but there is no doubt their PureRAW is something special.
(Click to view in Lightbox)
I was sat enjoying my 2nd cup of coffee this morning when a call from the garden came, it was Emma shouting “VULTURES!!!!…… LOTS OF THEM!!!!”. I stepped outside to a cloud filled sky of a large kettle (the collective name of Vultures in flight) of Griffon Vultures.
These large birds with a wingspan of up to 2.8 metres kept coming, lots of them, soaring high in the sky heading South-West. I estimated there to be at least 200 of them!
Griffon Vultures are one of the last to migrate hence why they can be seen this late into October and many of them will be juveniles. Unfortunatly, Griffon Vulture numbers are down in Portugal due to the government strictly following the EU directive of removing/burying dead cattle to eliminate the risk of Mad Cow disease. Spain does not follow this directive hence the larger numbers found across the border.
I scrambled to the studio to grab a camera….
