Amazing swarm of tens of thousands of Starlings

I found this video lurking on my computer, taken a few years ago at Otmoor nature reserve, near Oxford, and thought it was worth posting.

It's a swarm of an estimated 50,000 starlings, who roost in the reed beds there over the winter. Some of what seems to be background noise in the video is actually the noise of the starlings flying over. There's also a little rain of droppings as they pass - we had umbrellas with us!

Note: it's worth switching the video to the best quality - after starting it playing, click where it says "360p" at the bottom right of the player, and change it to "480p".

Mike

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Herring Gull and Starling through a telescope

Here's a few pics I took from the back garden, of birds on nearby house roofs. It was interesting watching a herring Gull close up. It was about 50m away, and had no idea I was watching it, so it was behaving naturally. From a distance they look like they're just sat there, being bored, but through the telescope it was clear that they were always on the lookout for something interesting, craning their necks to get a better view:

Here's one on another chimney, also about 50m away:

From the look of the feathers, this one's only just become an adult - there's still some traces of the brown juvenile feathers around the head:

This one was doing some preening as well as looking around:

I got a few pics of a Starling too:

I'm not sure what it was finding in the chimney pot:

This one was also preening:

and then having a good shake afterwards to get the feathers straight

Finally, I took a photo to give you an impression of the level of magnification being used. Here's some trees, and I've not cropped the picture at all. From looking at a map, I think they are about 600m away:

Mike

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Telescope SLR pictures

A short while ago I posted some pictures of birds taken using a telescope. Well, that was the small telescope, which is 90mm diameter, but has a focal length of 1250mm. This means it acts like an f14 1250mm lens, so with the SLR connected that's about 25x zoom, and that's just too much for the diameter, so the pictures come out dim. So I'd been using our compact camera with that telescope, and got some reasonable pictures.

Today however, I finally got my big telescope out of the loft for the first time since we moved, set it up, corrected the collimation, and took it out in the back garden see how it was with the SLR. Bear in mind this was at 3:50pm, so the light was fading fast, but I managed to get a few pics of starlings in a tree about 50-60m away:

That one's cropped, but here's a full frame, so you can see what's possible:

It works better as it's 200mm diameter, with a focal length of 1000mm, so it gives about 20x zoom and acts like an f5 lens. It's also easier to use the SLR with, as it has a port to connect it directly.

We've also been at the wood, clearing up some last remaining jobs, like this large edge Sycamore:

There's a few awkward Sycamore that we left last year, but now we have a decent winch, we're going to tackle them in the next few days. There's also a couple of Sycamore to come down that we're going to get a friend to fell, as they're bigger than I've trained for. We'll then process them on the ground.

Mike

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