"You miss one great bird but you get another"

Myself and good friend and fellow 'togger' Dave Gilbert fancied a day out on Saturday 22nd October and thought that we would firstly have a look for the Red-flanked Bluetail found at The Wenallt north of Rhiwbina, Cardiff by our very own Gethin 'The Twitchmeister' Jenkins-Jones.

Although the bird had not been reported for a number of days we thought it worth a punt, you never know your luck!

Dave had visited previously with his grandson Jenson failing to see the bird but knowing the location which it had favoured, we found our way to the spot from the top car park but after scanning with binoculars for about 45mins we decided it was like looking for a needle in a haystack and called it a day.

Dave had never seen a Collared Pratincole so we decided to spend the rest of the day at WWT Slimbridge and having parked up made our way to the Discovery Hide overlooking the South Lake which the bird had been favouring since it's arrival a few days prior.

My only other sighting of a Collared Pratincole in the UK was the bird that visited WWT Penclacwydd, Llanelli back in June 2005 although I have seen them in good numbers on a holiday to Portugal in spring some years ago.

We all know that a Saturday is not the best day to visit Slimbridge and true to form the place was overrun with families with pushchairs, with a really good bird on the reserve there were also good numbers of birders/toggers present as well.

We both managed to get an open window in the hide which we shared and although the bird was always distant we both managed some decent images with me using my Canon 2x extender and both of us changing the settings on our Canon R5s from full frame to 1.6x crop factor.

This reduces the pixels from 45mp to 17mp which in such circumstances is acceptable at a push.

After returning to my X Trail in the car park for lunch we made our way back to the Discovery Hide for more of the same, we also visited some of the other hides but most birds were too distant for any meaningful photos.

Having got our target bird we decided to head for home at about 4.00pm and just about made it before the forecast rain set in, here are a few images from a very enjoyable day out.......