After a long day at the birding hide in #Espelo we were almost ready to head home. Hoping a little bit for a sparrowhawk, but then this little guy showed up who gave us some nice opportunities for photos!

New #lifer for me!

🪶 #birds #birdphotography #piedflycatcher #bontevliegenvanger #birdinghide

Whilst I'm paying for car parking , Dave B walked on to Newlyn harbour #Cornwall & immediately zeroed in on the Ross's Gull. Superb teamwork!

Great views of this #lifer for me. #UKBirding #Birds #Nature #Wildlife #BirdsOfMastodon

📷 1-3 Ross's Gull
📷 Herring Gull, Turnstone, Great Black-backed Gull

Birding opportunities are currently thin on the frozen snow and sleet ground, so @CTGT and I were quite excited to add this Lapland Larkspur to our lifer list last weekend. This non-breeding adult was hanging out with a Horned Lark that had a broken beak and a Dark-eyed Junco.

#birds #birding #lifer #winter #nature #NaturePhotography #SolaceInNature #creationstruck #DelightOverDarkness

THREE (!!!) long-eared owls resting together as the sun goes down. I was walking around a new area and heard some songbird calls I wasn't familiar with. I was looking in this dense thicket to identify the source and then spotted the silhouette of one of the owls. I was super excited at my luck and when I moved to get a better angle, I noticed the other two. Photography was extremely challenging because of the thick brush, but I managed to keep my distance and find some OK angles. The best ones were when I was holding the camera over my head and using the rotating screen facing downward to focus and compose. For most of the shots, I had to use manual focus because the camera had a hard time separating the birds from the branches.

These images are a heavy crop with Lightroom denoise as I was not particularly close, only had a 40-150mm lens (80-300mm FF equivalent), and the light was fading as sunset approached.

#wildlifephotography #wildlife #birds #owls #raptors #olympus #om1 #lifer

In lieu of a partridge in a pear tree, I offer a #FridayFlashback of a purple sandpiper on a grey rock. This was a #lifer bird for @CTGT and I two Decembers ago and remains our only sighting of this species.

#birds #birding #shorebirds #nature #NaturePhotography #SolaceInNature