Fighting Redshanks on the Exe.

I spent more time yesterday in the public hide at Bowling Green Marsh. It was a bright sunny day, which was a great opportunity for everyone to, at last get out and do something. I was limited to a trip to B G Marsh because I had to use public transport and it was immediately obvious when I got there that I should have stayed at home. Unlike the dull rainy weather on Thursday, when I pretty much had the hide to myself, today it was full to capacity. I have to say that this had a massive impact on the bird behaviour, every self respecting bird keeping as far away from the hide as possible. There was even one"joker" stood outside, within the fence and fully exposed to the birds in front of him. For me it was almost a disaster and I was very disappointed to be honest. It was noisy, very noisy and once when a redshank flew in quite close, the chatter was so loud that the bird immediately flew off again to a safe distance. It's hard to understand, why you would go there to see the birds and then scare them away?  I just don't get it.  Still each to there own and if you go to a public hide you have to respect that other people are there for all sorts of reasons and not necessarily for the same reason as yourself.  I think I take some quite good photos and there is no secret, you need patience and perseverance and also good fieldcraft and a quiet approach. You need to be as close to your subject as possible and you can't get close to a wild creature by making noise and causing disturbance. Eventually people got bored and in the end, after more than two hours, only 3 other people were in the hide and guess what? The birds came in close and were eventually feeding on the grass and in the flood just in front of the hide. Again, patience and perseverance had paid off.  The Redshank are starting to come in to breeding condition and from time to time they would display some aggressive behaviour. I could see a situation starting to develop in front of me and I waited whilst one bird postured aggressively to another and then the fight kicked off. A great photo opportunity at last.  If you look at the series you can see that one bird gets the upper hand and literally holds the other's head under the water at one point.  This all took a matter of seconds and it was interesting to see what was actually happening because the eye could hardly follow the action.