After spending some of the morning of the 17th watching Siskin at the Baildon Co-op car park I decided to spend some of the afternoon in Shipley Glen.
The header image is of a Redpoll spotted in Shipley Glen.
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Redpoll
Having had a very quiet walk in the Glen with the Airedale and Bradford RSPB group on Sunday (see here RSPB & Shipley Glen. 15 March 2026) I was hoping that a visit on Tuesday would make up for it. The variety of birds spotted was still not great but getting sight of a flock of Redpoll made up for it.
Even though there were several birds in the flock I was lucky to spot them, tiny silhouettes. A lone Siskin was with them too. They were quiet and busy eating high up in the trees. I tried moving up the slopes of the Glen to get at a better height for the view. I even got up onto the flat of Bracken Hall Green but this meant that more trees were getting in the way.
With my eyes I can’t control how bright I see things, the bright sky made the birds too dark to see much of their colouring. With my camera though I dialled in some positive exposure compensation to make the birds brighter, at the same time I was careful not to go too far with it and blow out the sky.
Others
I think on this visit the Robins were the noisy ones with a reasonable number a Great Tits calling from several places.
Down at Crag Hebble Dam a Grey Heron came in looking for fish. I only saw it catch one.
As the afternoon moved on the Sun started to make quite a contrast on the narrow branches towards the tops of some of the trees.
Track
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The images are published under the Creative Commons, BY-NC-SA license. Feel free to share them, edit them, but please keep my name in the credits. And if I have got the ID of anything wrong please let me know, I don’t consider myself an expert but I have write something. It is often a best guess and it would take up too much room to say It could be this, or it could be… or perhaps.
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