Etherow Country Park

Mandarin duck
Lots of camera wobble with a 500mm lens at ⅙ second.

It was a dark, gloomy November day but as it was also surprisingly mild and dry I felt I couldn't spend the day with a pot of tea and a pile of Harold Hare comics despite having had two consecutive nights of not managing to get to sleep before five. I'd overslept, which limited my options so I decided to head off over to Etherow Country Park to take photos of mandarin ducks in the gloom. 

Etherow Country Park 

The mandarin ducks decided to make the challenge that more difficult by hardly bothering to get out of bed, lurking in the undergrowth below the canal banks. Taking photos with a long lens at one-sixth of a second is not so much pushing your luck as taking the Michael and it's a miracle not all of them were blurry abstracts. As is often the case the most interesting poor light photos turn out to be the ones where you're not frantically bracketing the exposure to get the most "natural" effect. Poor light and night photography really highlight the difference between the eye and the camera: the eye/brain combination makes a myriad micro adjustments and filling-in assumptions even within a matter of a second and what we see and the way we see it is more like the composition of a painting than the taking of a photo.

Etherow Country Park 

The supporting cast of Canada geese, coots and mallards were a bit thin on the ground and there was just the one mute swan about. Half a dozen tufted ducks drifted across the boating lake.

River Etherow 

The river was very high and with the Weir in full flow and only a couple of rocks projecting out of the water it was no surprise not to find any sign of a dipper.

Keg Wood 

I made brief nods to Ernocroft Wood and Keg Wood where most of the small birds had already given up on the day and the twilight shift of robins and blackbirds started early. Pairs of carrion crows sang their claims for prime nesting sites and a couple kept a watchful eye as a noisy buzzard floated in to roost in Ernocroft Wood.

Canada geese 

The drizzle started as I walked back to the car park and was proper rain as I stood waiting for the 384 to Stockport. Luckily there's a bus every twenty minutes and one was due in three minutes. It was that golden hour after the school run but before the rush hour when schedules are flights of fancy and the online information about bus times are at best a shot in the dark so when one turned up forty minutes later I decided to get off at Marple Station and get the train into Manchester, I'd have a five minutes wait at Marple and a good half hour to  get over to Oxford Road for the train home. Which turned out to be a very bad idea, the train was half an hour late into Piccadilly. So I both missed my train with an hour and a half to wait for the next and stuck at Piccadilly Gardens at the beginning of that hilarious period where you have to wait three quarters of an hour to wait for the two 256s that leave together (I'm really not making that up, I noticed tonight that the 255s were paired up, too, which is bad news as it's a less frequent service). Which is why it took three hours to travel fourteen miles. It's no wonder there's only us two old blokes birdwatching by public transport these days.