Common Crossbill, Haldon Hill, Devon

Some people will say that I am a lucky person, well I certainly am having a great life so I suppose that's lucky in itself but I always think about the quote by Garry Player who said, "The more I try, the luckier I get". No truer words have ever been spoken as far as I am concerned. Yesterday we had gone to Haldon to try and get some photographs of Common Crossbill, and apart from a quick glimpse of a small flock, we weren't successful. I put that down to two factors, an element of luck and when we did have luck, too much noise by other birders. You really do have to be quiet when you are birding in any form be it just general birding or trying to get a photo and the few birds that we did see moved off immediately because of one particularly noisy old man who I won't name here but he really should know better. In the past he had told me, when I wouldn't divulge the whereabouts of a Kingfisher nest, that he had been birding all his life and I had no right to keep information from him……… oh really!

I had been disappointed yesterday when we hadn't managed a photograph and I gave it a great deal of thought. I thought about my ringing training when by 11or 12 in the morning we only caught 10% of the birds that we had caught from first light until then. Birds are feeding in the winter for the first few hours of daylight because they have gone for 16 or so hours without food, it makes absolute sense really. So this morning I rushed down there as soon as I could get going and I got there quite early (for me that is). It was deadly quiet, almost frighteningly eerie apart from a lovely Roe Deer on the path in front of me. I had been literally in the woods for 5 minutes when I saw some movement in trees just a bit further on down the track. Then I saw more and then more, birds were feeding and they were quiet by the way, not calling and they never did. I got myself in the best position that I could and waited for them to come out from the middle of the tree, where they were feeding. They would fluuter out to the outer branches, bite off a cone and then take it back in to the midst of the tree to feed. That's why you can't always see them because they are hidden in the middle, in thick cover. As I stood there watching and waiting, I could see and hear cones falling all around me from the other trees. That was birds dropping them once they had taken the seeds out. I hadn't even been aware of these other birds but they were all around me in the trees. Something spooked them and about 20 left the tree that I was watching but I had only been aware of 3! After a few minutes I noticed that a few individuals remained and that's when I got my best shots.

It was still hard to get a good photograph because of the "back light" and the position which required me to hold my camera pointing skywards. I used a tree for support. I realised that the birds were, in actual fact, feeding in this tree as well, just above my head. It was quite an experince made all the more special by the sudden arrival of two Goldcrest.