Sex near the city

18 Sep

Attenborough yesterday. The early autumn fruits are ready – apple and blackberry, elderberry, hawberry and rosehip. Horse chestnut even.

While cabbage whites do floral cunnilingus, honey bees go deep stick. Everyone’s a winner.

Red winged damselflies do it in the air.

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The largest of Attenborough’s flooded gravel pits, fed by the Erewash flowing south through DH Lawrence country, drains into the Trent two hundred yards downstream of Barton Island. I often see a heron there, statuesque in the outlet’s whitewater and so close to the footbridge I can get passable shots on a phonecam.

Today I had my proper kit though: Canon 7D Mk II with L series 100:400 lens enhanced by my 1.4x extender to give a reach of 560mm. More if you add in the crop factor of an APS-C sensor.

So stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

I was halfway across the bridge when this glided in from the Trent’s south bank. I hadn’t time to focus, far less adjust shutter and aperture, but kept these shots for all their faults. I have few of herons airborne, and none at all head on.

To my surprise it didn’t take position in the water, not immediately. Instead it stalked the reeds a metre from the bank: a suboptimal tactic, piscatorially speaking. Que pasa?

Funny place to look for fish, mate.

Now I’m really puzzled …

… but this next pic, breeze on blade foxing autofocus, explains all. Herons, like most predators, are opportunists.

What a fine shot this would have been, had I caught the dragonfly as neatly as its nemesis has! Truth is – like the time earlier this year when I had a (rubbish) shot of a grebe about to eat its kill of a tiny pike – I didn’t even spot the dragonfly till I got the picture up on my computer screen.

Anyways … we all revert to type sooner or later. Sooner in this case. Here’s the same heron, not five minutes later, doing what it does best.

I didn’t even need to move to see my next bird. This grey wagtail homed in on a mossy stone a few yards downstream of the bridge, where it took up position near the heron.

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8 Replies to “Sex near the city

  1. Very impressive indeed. Because of the abundance of fruits, I feel we are in for a hard winter – never seen the s squirrel so busy burying his winter larder in our lawn, of course, that may be because our neighbour has artificial grass.

    • Ha ha. Maybe you should go astro turf too. Though on a serious note, how many tens of thousands of acres of garden – where countless life forms once thrived – have been lost to tarmac and paving slab, in the name of off-street parking, these past forty years or so?

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