Saturday 26 January 2013

Winter weather and Water rails

As I am sure most of you are aware that the last few weeks have been a mix of ice and snow which is perfect for what I wanted to achieve. I wanted to see if I could film or photograph a Water rail on my duck island where I have setup a bird feeding station for all the wild birds including Coots, Moorhens and my target bird as well. After a few weeks of adding more feeders and bird seed to the island they have begun to use in numbers ranging from 3-6 so quite a healthy population including more calling from the reed beds surrounding the island which is great and as you can see on my previous post I succeeded in filming one. 
I used a Go-pro which I kayaked to the island and left for an hour so that not to bad. 
But that's not enough for me as I want a close up photograph and more natural footage of them feeding in a group. This morning I bought some reed bed screening for the island for a small hide to see if I can get them this way using my D7000 remotely. As the lake is frozen it's tricky to get there now and even I though I have experience kayaking through ice my kayak would not be able to smash through 10cm of thick ice so it would flip me up if I tried.
Hopefully I can try again when the warmer weather comes in next week but after last nights thick snow it's at least 20cm thick with the layer of icy snow on top.
Wildlife watching supplies                                                                                                                            
So take care and thank you for reading
Wildlife watching supplies                                                                                                                            
Mike

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