Up Close and Personal!

Our garden feeders have been getting busier and busier over the past weeks. Flocks of great and blue tits have been squabbling amongst themselves and the lawn has been scattered with ground-feeders. I try to keep the various feeders filled but it's hard to keep up with them sometimes! Yesterday morning, while still wearing my pajamas, I wrapped up in my coat, gloves and bobble hat and blinked my way through the flurrying snow to refill the feeders. I normally put out a variety of food to keep everyone happy; suet pellets, peanuts, mixed seed, sunflower hearts, suet balls and some nyger seed for the occasional visiting goldfinches.

The great tits are certainly the boldest of our garden birds as they don't even wait for me to leave the area before helping themselves. In fact, I barely even step through the back door before they all descend from the surrounding branches, calling to each other to declare breakfast served! This is my favourite time to watch them, when the food is fresh (out of the packet) and there is a sense of excitement among the birds as they discover if there is anything new on the menu. 

Usually I try to take photos of our feathery visitors from the kitchen window but the feeders are too far away for it to really be worth it, until I get my hands on a telephoto lens for the SLR! On this particular morning, however, I decided to try something new. I took my handheld camera, a tripod and a large umbrella (the snow had turned to drizzle at this point) and set up a rudimentary filming rig on a chair about 2 metres away from the feeding station. My handheld is of reasonable quality and has a good zoom on it but being so close to the station meant that I didn't need to zoom in too far and lose too much image quality. I pushed the record button and went back inside, leaving the birds to do their thing, with the hope of getting some good, close-up footage of them. 

I wasn't disappointed at all! The images in this post are screen grabs from the footage I got and I was particularly pleased with the very close shots of the seed feeder, where it was easy to see the birds picking out the seeds they wanted and flicking the rest on the floor. At least the blackbirds and pigeons are kept busy! What was perhaps the best observation was seeing how many seeds the nuthatch slotted into his long beak before flying off. One of the marsh tits too paid a visit, flew off then returned still holding a seed only to add an extra one to his already-full mouth. 

It's fascinating to see all of these species at such close range, enough to be able to see the detail on their faces and the markings on their wings. Considering I was only using a small handheld camera, I'm quite impressed with the footage I managed to get from this endeavour. I went through it all, taking the best clips and put them all together to create a five-minute video which is actually very relaxing to watch; there's something almost mesmerising about it. Or maybe that's just me!

You can watch the video on my YouTube channel here or below. Let me know what you think!

My Big Garden Birdwatch 2015

Getting out of a warm bed at 8am seemed like a crazy thing to be doing on a Saturday morning, particularly after a long and busy week. I had good reason for my crazy weekend behaviour of course; there were garden birds to be surveyed! I had checked the weather forecast the day before and although the high temperature was predicted to be a balmy 4°C, the sun promised to be out for most of the day. Knowing my birds though, I wanted to do the survey earlier in the day when I tend to see the majority of our regularly-visiting species.

By 8.30am, I was bundled up in several layers, a wooly hat and gloves, and headed out to the garden shed to dust off our camping chairs. I had to kindly ask three quite large wood spiders to remove themselves from the chairs I was trying to unload but I'm not too sure they were very happy to be disturbed; well, it was the weekend after all! Chairs dusted off, flasks of tea made, feeders topped up and notebook in hand-I'm old-fashioned and prefer paper and pen when recording birds-we were ready to go. My mum joined me for the watch and we settled in for an hour of birdwatching in the surprisingly mild January sun.

Our birds aren't shy by any means. I do think they have become used to us over the years we've lived in this house and of course they have worked out that we are the ones providing the medley of treats they enjoy everyday. Certain species, such as the robin and blue tits, have no issues with landing on the feeders when we are only a few feet away. In fact, once the ten minutes before we officially started the clock had passed, the robins, nuthatches, blue and great tits had all but forgotten we were there. The coal and marsh tits were slightly more wary but they eventually just got on with things. I will point out that we were not seated close at all; in fact, I moved us back another foot before we started as I didn't want to affect the number of birds visiting by our unnecessary proximity. I chose not to do the survey from our kitchen window as we have a reasonably large garden and it's quite tricky to count all of the birds by peering through one pane of glass. Plus, there's nothing like listening to the different songs and calls and we were not disappointed in that regard!

One thing I noticed in particular during the hour was the feisty behaviour of a bird I wouldn't normally expect it from. There was an individual blue tit who was determined to chase off each and every bird that landed remotely close to him. Not just his own species but the robins and great tits too; he even had an attempt at seeing off one of the nuthatches but that wasn't quite so successful. This blue tit had obviously decided that this year was his year to mate with the best females and he was quite convinced he would get rid of all the competition. This fiery behaviour kept up throughout the whole hour we were out there and well into the rest of the day that followed.

I have a few personal highlights from the count. My first was the appearance of a female woodpecker. The great spotted woodpeckers visit the garden daily when there is food provided; they are usually found hanging off the suet holder or the peanut feeder. Despite their regular visits, I never tire of seeing them feeding and, at such close range, being able to identify the male and female by the red spot on the back of the male's head. The female turned up during our watch and sat in a tree a little way back for a while, taking her time before deciding to venture on to the fat balls. She wasn't around for long but after she had flown off, I could hear a male drumming very close by. I had hoped that both of them would make an appearance together, as they did in last year's birdwatch, but it wasn't to be.

Another highlight was the very brief appearance of a vole. I say very brief because it was just that; just enough for my mum to spot it before it scurried back into the hedgerow. We were obviously too daunting to make the dash to the bottom of the feeding station worth it. There was a fairly frustrating moment during the survey where I spotted what I was convinced was a bullfinch. The trouble was, it was completely silhouetted by the sun and it was sat further back in the branches of the small tree where all of the other species were busy feeding. It was the stocky shape and short, wedge-like head that had me certain it was a bullfinch and, despite me hoping that it would come closer into the light, it hung back and dropped lower into the undergrowth. At one point, when I was distracted by birds further along the garden, my mum whispered that she was sure a bullfinch had just landed in the tree then flown off into the wood. Without seeing it myself and gaining 100% confirmation, I couldn't list it as a sighted species. Very gutting.

I was eager to compare this year's results to those from 2014, although I knew without looking that the species count was less this time around. Our wren didn't turn up and neither did we have a visit from the woodpigeon or carrion crow. In total this year we had a bird species count of 9 in contrast to 11 last year. However, with both the squirrel and a vole turning up this year, and a mammal count of 0 in 2014, the species count evens out to 11 both ways.

Incidentally, that's two years in row we have had sunshine for the survey and both years have given reasonable turnouts. I wonder what the results would show if we were to have a little of the famous British rain for next year's count? 

I wonder if perhaps I'll be watching from the window if we do!

Here's a few minutes of footage I captured during the watch, including a glimpse of the woodpecker and the cheeky grey squirrel helping himself!

Tis the season to get fledging!

After all the built-up excitement around our two nesting bird families, the nuthatches and blue tits, I had to come to the conclusion over the past couple of weeks that the chicks have now already fledged. I wasn't fortunate enough to catch the event as it happened and I suspect this will be because the parents chose a very early morning when the garden would have been much quieter and therefore safer for the fledglings. As disappointing as this realisation was, I still feel very fortunate to have witnessed the activity that I did. Seeing the nuthatches excavate their nest hole and patch it up with mud; watching the blue tits pulling tufts of cat and horse hair into the nestbox; hearing both blue tit and nuthatch chicks chirping away whenever a parent bird arrived with a wriggling grub in their beak. This is behaviour that I've never been lucky enough to see before and for that reason, I feel very fortunate.

That said, this past week or so has made up for the lack of fledging activity as the garden has played host to a variety of species, young and old. For a while, during the nesting period, it all went very quiet out there and if the nuthatches and tits hadn't been nesting, I think it would have been a rather dull few weeks, bird-wise! Understandably, during that time, all breeds of adult birds are very much occupied by the important task of raising a brood of chicks, something that doesn't allow for much lesiure time to visit feeders. I have noticed now that the garden has come alive again. It's absolutely bursting with life, including all our usual suspects; robins, blue, coal and marsh tits, blackbirds, dunnocks, chaffinches, woodpigeons, nuthatches, great tits and great spotted woodpeckers. Those last two are the most exciting to me, as it hasn't only been the adults I've spotted!

At one point maybe a fortnight ago, I noticed one rather scruffy-looking great tit pecking around on the grass, watched very closely by an adult. The bedraggled bird still had some of it's downy chick feathers attached and it was very yellow. Several days after this and daily since, the feeding station has been bustling with a flock of juvenile great tits, maybe eight or nine of them, all still with a yellow tinge but well-developed and the same size as their parents. They all stay close together, choosing to huddle in the surrounding trees and jostle for space on the feeders. There is a lot of chasing too and once one or two take off, the rest seem to follow quite quickly!

We are certainly no strangers to the woodpeckers in our garden. It is a daily occurrence to see at least one of them on the peanuts, but more likely we will see both the male and female on separate visits throughout the day. Occasionally they visit together which is a wonderful sight. This week though they have been joined by a juvenile and I have assumed that it is their chick, although I know that there is more than one pair of woodpeckers in our area. It was instantly recognisable by the nearly all-red cap and rather sandy coloured belly feathers. The behaviour too, especially when it was joined by one of it's parents, was a very good indication that this was a recently-fledged juvenile. When I first spotted it, the adult male was also there and the juvenile hung from the top of the feeder waiting to be fed by the adult. 

I took this picture at the end of May and since then, the red cap has started to fade towards the back. All three of the woodpeckers are certainly making good use of the peanuts as they are almost permanently hanging from them. Frequently,  I see both the juvenile and one of the adults together on the feeding station and on a few occasions I have seen all three of them together in the garden. One of these moments looked like it could have been a flying lesson for the juvenile as it was hopping from trunk to fence and then flying low across the garden. 

They have such a distinguishing call as well that I quite often hear them before I see them! I often remind myself of how lucky we are to have woodpeckers visiting. I know our rural location is the reason we get such a wide variety of visitors and I never take this for granted.

From 4 hours to 6 1/2 minutes in a few clicks!

As promised, I have put together a new time-lapse video using footage from my most recent portrait. It is a much more relevant video when compared to my first attempt; you play those two side-by-side and tell me you can't see a HUGE progression! It's still cringey to watch the first one but good for me to see how much I've improved since doing that portrait.

I had fun and games with this video, mainly issues with my backing music. From my collection of music, I found a great song from one of my favourite artists that worked really well with the whole time-lapse ("Music is Through" by Jamie Cullum if you are interested!) and even the timing at the end was perfect. Unfortunately, it wasn't until I played the whole thing through from start to finish that I realised Mr Cullum swears twice during the song. I ummed and aahed for a while, wondering if I could get away with it, but in the end I decided I couldn't. Uploading it onto Facebook and YouTube would have meant I'd have to include an "explicit content" warning (as crazy as it sounds for two words!) and I didn't like the thought of putting you all off with that! Plus, I'm hoping to have the video on my website when I update it soon so for the sake of professionalism, I went with something different.

So John Coltrane takes the lead on this one, another fabulous musician who I love listening to. Let me know what you think of the new video!

Progress in a Short Time

I recently put together a time-lapse video of my work, using footage from one of my very first portraits. It was great fun and really simple to do, and I think it is a good alternative way of showing my process, instead of the static images I normally use.

I can't TELL you how much I cringed while making it though! The reason for said cringing was entirely down to my technique in the footage, or lack thereof. I find it incredible that my skills have progressed quite so much in such a relatively short period of time and looking at that footage has made me realise how much I have learnt in the last year or so. My style has become a lot more detailed and since starting to apply base layers, I have been able to achieve much more depth and texture within each portrait.

For instance, the above piece is the very first portrait I ever did. I had never done one before so had no particular technique to follow; I was somewhat winging it. The customer was very pleased with it and felt it was a true reflection of the two dogs' characters which is great but looking at it now, there are some things I would definitely change. I made no allowance for mounting/framing and the style to me seems a lot more cartoonish than my current style. I would love to have another crack at the same dogs, to apply the skills I have picked up. 

Using another example shows my progression in an even clearer light. 

2012

2013

The first photo is the portrait I worked on in the time-lapse and the second piece is a very similar one that I completed for Christmas 2013. The most noticeable change to me is the fact that I don't use black ink anymore. I still use white ink for the final highlights; it is something of a signature thing for me which I have been doing since 2012, as I love to pick out the twinkle in the eye or the shine on the nose and the bright white ink helps me do that. However, I no longer use the black ink to bring out the darker areas. I have to say, I'm glad I stopped using it! The more recent portrait has a much more realistic quality about it which pleases me.

I'm supremely grateful that I have been given enough opportunity to progress my skills; if my lovely customers didn't keep booking with me, I'm not sure I'd be able to improve as swiftly as I have done and I only look forward to making even more improvements in the coming year!