Norwegian landscape through the year

Norwegian landscape is very different from anything you can see in the rest of Europe. Especially for middle-Europeans is every trip to Norway a life-experience and even for us who have been living here for some time now, it always brings a new views and feelings. Although the heading of this article is “Norwegian landscape through the year”, it in fact only presents diverse landscape pictures from late Spring to Autumn – for the rest of the year Norway becomes a “Grey Kingdom” with short dark days and cloudy sky that turns everything into misty and blurry tones with no colours...

Handicapped does not mean ugly

This title of the article suggested my wife after I came back from Sunday birding trip to Herdla nature reserve (Askøy Island, Bergen, Norway) and watched the pictures on our PC. My primary target of the Sunday`s trip were the Snow Buntings (Plectrophenax nivalis) that regularly visit Herdla in autumn months and sometimes stay over the winter, but at the end there were especially the pictures of Dunlin (Calidris alpina) that made my day on Sunday including picture of one poor Dunlin with missing left leg…

Birds of Scotland IV: A few notes from Outer Hebrides

I was surprised to learn that Scotland had the same total area as my home country Czech Republic! I don’t know why I thought that the northern part of United Kingdom is so large – maybe because it seems so far from my country, maybe because of its rich history. Nevertheless, I kept this feeling even after we have left Scotland after our spring three-week trip – it might have been because of the countless narrow roads where you have to give a way to oncoming vehicle for a hundred time in one single day, or it might have been caused by the beautiful but always different landscape that you see on the way. And then, when you think you have seen every possible scenery in the world, then you come to Outer Hebrides to find flat land covered with heather and windburned by the strong storms coming from Atlantic Ocean, to hear the strange dialect of locals and to experience a weird feeling of desolation and rough beauty of landscape. Our only four days on Outer Hebrides meant we could superficially explore the islands but had not much time to watch birds. The little we saw from avifauna is included in this short article…

Birds of Scotland III: Cliff colonies of North and West coast

The cliffs rimming most of the coast of Scotland are home to hundreds of thousands of seabirds. Almost every cliff is teeming with life and host at least one of the most common species of seabirds – mostly Fulmars (Fulmarus glacialis), ever-present Gulls, Guillemots (Uria aalge), Razorbills (Alca torda) and Atlantic Puffins (Fratercula arctica). During our June trip to Scotland we had an opportunity to visit some of the most famous cliff colonies on the northern and western coast of Scotland...

Birds of Scotland II: east coast – Fowlsheugh and Troup Head

Scotland and generally the whole United Kingdom is a paradise for birdwatchers. Great number of RSPB reserves (The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) is represented by cliff colonies of seabirds that can be found along the whole coast in United Kingdom and adjacent islands. The most common and well-known inhabitants of these colonies are gulls, Guillemots, Razorbills, Puffins and others less numbered species...

Runde 2009 – birds in the mist

Birds of Scotland I: Bass Rock – wildlife wonder of the world

One of the wildlife wonders of the world – this is how Sir David Attenborough called the rocky island standing up from the waters close to the coast some 35 km east of Edinburgh. When I saw the first pictures of Northern Gannet from Bass Rock on the internet, I realized that the documentary I watched few years ago and where David Attenborough is watching large Gannet colony was shot here on Bass Rock. At that time I thought that the documentary was shot somewhere far north in arctic waters...

Last shots from winter 2008/2009

So the spring is definitely here and to finish the past season I have skimmed through the folders with bird pictures to process the last images that deserved my attention...

First spring pictures – Common Crossbill

The last Saturday, 21.3.2009, I drove towards Øygarden (the northern part of Sotra island) to do the first spring birdwatching there. The spring is still at the beginning and thus the only species indicating start of migration were two Lapwings and one Oystercatcher at the island and two Curlews at the coast. I thought it would be quite bad day for photography but it turned into success as soon as I noticed a pair of Common Crossbill feeding on the pine-trees....

Smoke games

It was in the winter last year when I tried to make picture of smoke – it is not very difficult, what you only need is the package of joss-sticks, strong light and dark background....

Gulls in flight

Birds in flight (BIF) photography is one of the biggest challenge in wildlife photography. Besides the need to master the panning technique we also need to employ good photo equipment – when making the pictures of birds in flight the biggest effort is to keep the object (bird) within the viewfinder and one has not much time to control exposure or focus of the moving object at the same time. It was in June 2008 when I tested the new camera canon 1D Mark III for the first time...

Hidden life of water

The idea of photographing water drops came to my mind not long time after I have started with photography in 2004. At that time I found a nice picture on the website – the picture of falling drop of water which was magnifying, as a fish-eye lens, the bathroom background behind the drop itself. Surprisingly, right the first shots of droplets I have made with my then camera Sony DSC 717 looked pretty good and these pictures were actually the very first pictures I was kind of proud to had been made by myself...

A little Summer reminiscence

There is not much to see outside these days in February, moreover the Kalandsvatnet lake that I wanted to visit this weekend froze over and so I ended up sitting in front of my PC digging out the the last decent images from the last year – today I came across the pictures from June 2008, from the day when I tried my new camera Canon Mark 1DIII for the first time in the field…

Gallery – USA 2006

Gallery – Norway

With a big delay I put into the gallery some other pictures from Norway – the country where I spent 2 years during last five years of my life and where we are going to stay for at least next two years. As I have been photographing almost exclusively birds during last year, the pictures in Norway gallery come mainly from the time before or from the trips that were not focused on photographing birds. Some pictures are from Bergen...