Up in the mountains with Wallcreeper

Yesterday i went on a one-day trip to mountain Montaž (Italy). It was a nice day with sun and some good species.

The highlight was a nice Wallcreeper foraiging the walls very high up and it was constantly flying around so sadly close views were not available.

Other birds around included some migrants and locals like Crag Martin, Tree Pipits, Water Pipits, Whinchats, Red-backed Shrike 10+, Wheatear 10+, Yellow Wagtail, Yellowhamer, Alpine Accenator etc.

Also some mammals around like this nice family of Alpine Ibexes and a lot of Alpine Marmots.

August photo-raft session

Yesterday I went to my favorite place for bird photography with floating hide - Medvedce reservoir. There was a lot of Little Crakes (from 11 birds I saw only 2 females, rest of them were young), which I love to takes photos as they are very cooperative when taking photos :) Few birds came as 20cm close to my hide and fed like I wasnt there.

Although I was in the water already at 5.00 am, lighting on some photos isn't as I would wanted to be. Purple Heron photos were made at around 13.00 pm. Thats the worst time for taking pictures for me as the sun is too high and too strong. Few more shots I made:

When I wasgetting out of the water, Ferruginous duck female started to swim towards me. I was surprised, when I saw she wasnt alone :) She had 5 assistants. Thats great because this spieces is very rare breeder in Slovenia.

I was in raft from 5.00 am till 14.00 pm. When I came out I was exhausted, not just because of Water caltrop (its very hard to walk through this with water raft), but also because I had hard struggle with more than 50 leeches climbing on me and thousands of mosquitoes.

Island of Pag

This year again we visited island of Pag in the last week of april and i must say it was preety good. This year i went with Alen Ploj and Aleksander Kozina and as usual we want to get some good birds up close. We managed to get quite some pictures and also some rarities and local godies.

Short list of more interesting birds:

• Lesser Kestrel 2 ad. 
• Red-throated Pipit (seen on daily basis + one nice flock of 6 individuals)
• Citrine Wagtail 1
• Glossy Ibis 15+
• Spoonbill 2
• Golden Eagle
• Montague's Harrier
• Rock Patridge (a bit everywhere)
• Stone Curlew (nice numbers around Velo Blato)
• Marsh Sandpiper
• Pygmy Cormorant
• Tawny Pipit
• Black-eared Wheatear (around 6 pairs)
• Woodchat Shrike 5+
• Calandra Lark
• Blue Rock Thrush (on 5 locations)
• Bee-eater (everywhere)
• Hoopoe
• Little Owl
• Curlew Sandpiper 
• Little Bittern
• Squacco Heron       

Some pictures:

                                                                                                                       

Kingfisher (Alcedo atthis)

After a long abscence on the blog we are finally back to post more ocasionally again. So there is first blog after one year and it is about my little Kingfisher photo project. My friend told me about one place where he sees Kingfisher very often so i had to try to get some proper shots of it and my misson was to get it with a proper fish but by now i hadn't been lucky with that but for the start it is ok. Must sit few more hours in the masking tent to finish this project. There are also some other interesting species around like Dipper, Honey Buzzards, Golden Orioles etc.

Some photos below (last two were made by my phone) :

Raft photography

Birdraft with Alen in it

Had no time for birding or photographing for almost a month because of school but today I finally got some time to write this post about little photo sessision with Alen on Medvedce reservoir previous sunday. We started early in the morning at 4.00 and end at 11.00 when the sun was so hard that photo opps were literally at zero point so the best pics were made early when the light was still soft and not overburnt.
Many birds around including numerous families of Pochards and also family of  Red-crested Pochards which had 6 youngsters. Othervise nothing really interesting to report maybe 1 Squacco Heron and  1 Mediterranian Gull.

Some photos:

 Great-crested Grebe

 Black Kite

 Ferruginous Duck

 Pair of Marsh Harriers

 Little Grebe

 Pochard

 Pochardlings