Quiet times at Sevenoaks

I've got my blog posts in a twist. This one is about a trip to Sevenoaks Wildlife Reserve two weeks ago, and I didn't think I had enough photos to make up a blog, but then I looked again and decided I did, just. A warm and sunny day, not much about bird-wise as is usual for this time of year...

... but I couldn't not blog about seeing one of these. A gorgeous, fantastic Crab Spider, lurking on a suitably yellow flower (I think it's a Corn Marigold) in the cultivated 'wheat-field' bit of the Wildlife Garden. I watched it make its way from this flower to an Ox-eye Daisy, via a neat little silk bridge.

On the way round to the Willow Hide I flushed a Kingfisher from the same half-submerged branch that I'd photographed the young Grey Heron on a week before. If I'd been walking more slowly and had my wits about me I might have got a pic... but probably not.

The Willow Hide provided an uninspiring view across almost birdless water. One of the birds that was on view was this eclipse drake Mallard, looking quite dapper as eclipse ducks go.

I went to 'Reed Warbler corner' for a little while. There were passerines moving about, but the vegetation's so high now that it's hard to see anything. Much peering through the foliage finally yielded this dozy male Blackcap, who clearly thought I couldn't see him. I also saw a Brown Hawker dragonfly from here.

From the silent and furtive to the vocal and visible. Close to 'Reed Warbler corner', this Goldfinch twittered brightly away from the most prominent perch around, and put up with me standing at the foot of his tree aiming a large lens up at his face with remarkable patience.

While I was photographing this lot, Rob was once again camped on the lake shore, doing focus tests with the Sigmonster. The results of these tests convinced him that the lens had to go back to Sigma to have its distance softness problem investigated, and he decided he would take the Bigmos in at the same time for a look at its back-focusing on close subjects. Hopefully we won't be without our big lenses for too long... and in the meantime it will be mainly macro stuff and landscapes for us.