Rye Return

Having spent last weekend in Yorkshire staying with friends there were no real opportunities for wildlife photography hence no posting this week. Today however I returned to Rye Mead nature reserve in the hope of photographing the young Kingfishers who should have fledged. As you can see I was lucky to capture an adult Kingfisher feeding a young Kingfisher in tree branch adjacent to the lake. You can see the difference between the Young Kingfisher and the adult as it is less colourful and looks quite brown . The image is not very sharp as the area where they perched was quite a distance away and it was quite dark. I was also using a 2x Sigma telecoverter on my Sigma 300mm f2.8 and I have come to the conclusion that this is not a good combination. I was however one of the very few in the packed hide who managed to get an image of them together. The male Kingfisher also briefly perched on the pole closest to the hide about thirty feet away but fustratingly stayed there less than a second and no one managed to get a shot of this. I have also included a photo of a sandy looking kestrel that is nesting about twenty feet high in a box attached to a powerline in the Reserve car park. Finally I have included an out of focus image of a snake that was swimming across the lake as seen from the Kingfisher hide today. I don't have any idea what type of snake it is but it was chased away by an aggressive looking coot and dived under the water when the coot approached it. It was a good day in the hide and although I only planned to stay for two hours was still there four hours later.