Connor and I spent the best part of five hours at the Riverside Country Park in Gillingham, we've been going for a few years now but only as somewhere different to take the dog.
Since getting Connor his camera christmas we've started taking more notice of whats around us, we've always seen the birds in the mud but described them all as ducks.
In the last few weeks [and getting inspiration from this site] we've been making lists of what we've seen, you get a tick for sighting and another for getting a picture. The list is now close to 50
, you have to remember they were all ducks to us but we now we can name a lot of them
Getting the picture is really difficult but so rewarding when you manage to get one good enough that you can make out what bird it is, both Connor and I have compact camera's with small diameter lenses and not a great deal of zoom. I purchased a Lumix Z28 which has an 18x zoom plus extra optical and digital zoom functions, the digital is pretty useless really and the extra optical
only achieves larger images by cropping.
We unfortunately bought Connor an even smaller compact as we were aiming for something that fitted into his pocket for school trips, I caught him taking pictures with it through his binnoculars this morning, he got some good results but I'm guessing a different camera is not to far off. I have to give him a lot of credit for what he achieves with it though and he's two ahead in our species game with pic's
Getting back to this morning now and and how brilliant it was
to list just a few bird's that we recognised [knew names of] would include:
Shelduck.
Shoveller.
Pintail.
Teal.
Widgeon.
Redshank.
Grey Plover.
Many Gull's [don't know their names yet]
Curlew.
Oystercatcher.
Moorhen.
Brent Geese and many more.
Now behind us in the bushes we spotted:
Green Wood Pecker.
Chaffinch.
Robin.
Sparrows.
Blackbird's.
Blue, Great and Long Tailed Tit's.
Reed Bunting.
And again many more.
The morning was that wonderful that I ended up taking 295 pictures and Connor took 190, some of the pictures we took are the best we've ever taken [ok, we're not really geared up for it yet but
] in the few week's we've been taking camera's with us. A truly amazing time and when you've finshed and you're all full of excitement it's over to the Cafe for bacon bagettes and a mug of hot chocolate.
Here's just 3 of mine as I'm not 100% sure I'm doing it right
In the second picture [foreground] can you identify the small birds feeding with the Redshank
Lastly, we bought two brilliant pairs of binnoculars from Lydl, 10x50 coated lenses, 5 year guarrantee £12.70 a pair
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