My ramblings, my photos, photography, image editing, etc.

Mid April 2019 on Baildon Moor

I have spent far too much time recently trying to sort through my photos so I decided I was long overdue for a wander or two. This time it was up to Baildon Moor.

It was great to hear Skylark up in the sky and I even managed to spot them on a couple of occasions. Tiny dots fluttering away high overhead.

I did spot one on a wall with its crest up. It spent most of its time looking down to the other side of the wall where it seemed a Skylark was singing. I thought they sang when up in the air.

At this time of year Lapwing are breeding on and around Baildon Moor and this one is trying to distract me from its nest. They often fly up into the air to dive bomb larger birds that fly by.

After moving away from it I could see that it had gone back to its nest.

A couple of Hares showed themselves for a few seconds….

.. before running off to deeper cover.

I was a little surprised to hear a Snipe calling and spent some time looking along walls and fence posts until I spotted one. At about the same time I heard one calling to my right and then another making a thrumming noise with its tail feathers during its dive but didn’t spot them. I’ll be trying later in the year to get a decent shot of a diving Snipe.

I was also pleased to see and hear Golden Plover. A couple of times about 60 took to the air and flew around a bit before settling down to feed on the insects and worms.

The Plover tend to stay together but one slowly wandered away from the others feeding as it went.

It looks as though it heard my shutter a couple of times or perhaps saw me move.

Most of the others seemed to be disturbed as a Crow flew over and flew, as a flock, further away. The lone one kept perfectly still for a while before running then flying off to join the others.

A couple of times the whole flock took to the air and I did try using a photo of that as the header image, the one right up near the top of this post, but it just looked like 200 black dots across the screen so I swapped it for a zoomed in crop of a flock. On a phone the black chests of the male Golden Plover in the photo above probably look like little black smudges – it looks better on a 27 inch monitor. 🙂


Posted

in

by

Tags:

Comments

4 responses to “Mid April 2019 on Baildon Moor”

  1. MarkP Avatar
    MarkP

    Great blog, thank you sharing.

  2. Issie Avatar
    Issie

    Really interesting blog and great photos.
    I live on the glen and see and hear a lot of these birds each day and wondered what they looked like close up.
    Thank yiu.

    1. Paul Marfell Avatar
      Paul Marfell

      Thanks for the comments.

      You will also be hearing the eerie call of Curlew, another ground nesting bird. I have written about these on my blog in the past but hope to get some more photos of them this year.

  3. […] week ago I almost stood on a Lapwing nest containing three eggs. It was in the middle of a track made by the golf club maintenance vehicles and very close to the […]

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.