Sofa Safari #2

It’s been a while since I last had any action at the bird feeders in my garden. After an initial showdown if blue tits, great tits, and robins trying to get to the last of the seeds at the beginning of lockdown in mid-March, it went very quiet all of a sudden. Apparently this is normal (according to the RSPB anyway), but I did wonder if I needed to step up my feeding game.

So I stocked up on some better quality bird seed, as well as a large bag of meal worms. But apart from a bunch of bullish wood pigeons and a cheeky magpie which were now trying their best to knock the new feeders off the hooks, the small birds which I was hoping to lure back stayed away. Until this week! And this time they brought the whole family and their gold finch mates along!

Pretty much as suddenly as they had all disappeared, the garden was one morning filled with loads of different birds. Unsurprisingly, the meal worm feeder, hanging inside the wooden arch at the back of the garden, was the favourite. I can’t tell you how excited I was about the gold finch in particular. I don’t think I’ve seen one in real life before, so having two frequent my garden was a nice treat.

But, admittedly, even cuter than the gold finch were the young robins. Their flying skills were already pretty impressive, and they’ve clearly been fed quite well over the past few weeks too. But they weren’t quite at the stage yet where they were attempting to feed themselves. So instead, they bounced between the fence and the patio, chirping demandingly at their parents, and basically pretending they hadn’t eaten in weeks. Kids….

Their antics were hilarious to watch and even more fun to photograph. And since the action mostly happened siting down, rather than in mid air, I actually managed to capture some decent images too 😉

The featured photo at the top of this post is of a young robin seemingly pointing at the meal worm feeder, demanding to have “one of those”.
It was taken with my Sony A7Riii camera with 100-400mm lens attached. No filters or extender necessary. Taken at 400mm, f5.6, 1250 ISO, 1/800s it was mostly edited in Color Efex Pro with some final tweaks added in Adobe Lightroom.

The series below (do flick through them in sequence, it is quite a funny scene) took place on top of the wooden arch, directly above the meal worm feeder. Taken at 400mm, f5.6, 2000 ISO, 1/1250s these are exclusively edited in Adobe Lightroom, with all settings copied and pasted to all images in the sequence to ensure they all have the same look and feel.

Update: Funnily enough, it has gone quiet again at the feeder now. Every now and then, a single bird makes an appearance, and it’s especially great to see when one of the young robins, who are now able to feed independently take their pick from the meal worm feeder. I can’t wait to see whether they’ll all come back at some point. If I’m still working from home when they do, I’m already looking forward the next set of photos I’ll end up taking on my Sofa Safari 🙂

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These images are also now available for purchase from my Pixels online store.