Monday, March 31, 2014

Spring's arrived...........

Last Saturday saw Teresa and myself entertaining friends Neil and Gail up at the caravan with the lads enjoying a pleasant hike up to the top of Sugar Loaf (a mountain "tick" for me) followed by a thoroughly enjoyable evening at Theater Brycheiniog in Brecon being royally entertained by world famous mountaineer Andy Kirkpatrick who had recently returned from climbing "El Cap" in Yosemite National Park with Alex Jones of BBC's "The One Show" in aid of Sport Relief.
Sunday dawned a beautiful Spring day and I arranged to meet friend and fellow "togger" Steve Wilce up at Cantref Reservoir for a spot of Osprey passage watching,I've seen five different birds there in the last two years but we had no such luck on this occasion.
We decided to cut our losses at about 11.30am and moved on to Craig Cerrig Gleisiad in the hope of catching up with a newly arrived Ring Ouzel.
It was reasonably quiet and we made our way about halfway along the main track,we scanned the scrub and cliff area for about 10 mins and finally heard the distinct "clucking" call of a Ring Ouzel but try as we might we couldn't get on to it.
We decided to call it a day and after walking about 80m back towards the top gate we again heard the call but this time lower down and it appeared as if the bird had waited for us to move on before dropping down to the base of the cliff.
We swiftly moved back up to our original position and I picked up a male bird in the top of a hawthorn and as we approached it dropped down amongst the rocks out of sight allowing us to make a closer approach.

The bird seemed quite settled feeding in the area moving between ground feeding and the hawthorn trees without coming really close and I managed a few "record" shots.
We settled down out of the sun in the shade of the cliff and the bird eventually moved down closer and gave itself up for a few better shots which I was quite pleased with...............
I thought that I had heard another bird calling and the bird that I had photographed flew past us and perched up in a tree near the small stream where it remained for a minute before flying out with another male bird in tow disappearing over the grassy humps and out of sight !!
We hadn't seen the other bird at all but then again we had been concentrating on the bird in the photographs.
After a stop for a bacon roll in one of the laybys on the A470 we headed for Llangors Lake and after a fruitless scan for the two Great White Egrets from Llangasty we called it a day.
After a slow start the morning developed into a "real good un",here's hoping that the rest of Spring is equally productive.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Cracking set of shots Jeff, we'll worth the effort, wonder what happened to the osprey this year.

Wayne said...

Very nice. Ospreys next weekend.

Jeff said...

Yep,Ospreys next weekend,it was 8th April 2012 that we had the two at Cantref.

JRandSue said...

Cracking shots.
John.