We're all gloomed

Hong Kong seems to have been living in grey and white for months. No blue sky days to lift the gloom. I have done trips to Dubai and Korea this week. The former was 35 degrees Celsius and the latter zero degrees. Seoul had its coldest April day for 45 or 100 years, depending on your informant. All I know is that I arrived in good health and left with a chest cough and sore throat.

I was looking forward to unpacking my new camera when I arrived home. The sense of anticipation was not especially high as the new version is not dramatically different from the old one but does perform better in certain key areas such as auto focus, noise levels etc. What I had not bargained for was a second new camera courtesy of Mrs. Ha, bless her cotton socks.

She decided that I needed a new Leica as my old one is now a mere 51 years old and takes that strange old stuff called film. Well whoever it was who allegedly said of I am a Camera, "Me no Leica", I am sorry, me Leica very much. A brand spanking new black M9 with a stunning F0.95 Noctilux lens was waiting to be trialed. So this weekend the Canon has been much neglected and the Leica has been in constant use. And what better conditions can you ask for to test a low light speciality lens than Hong Kong Gloom.

For those who are not already asleep at more camera-porn the M9 is a digital rangefinder. It has no autofocus and in sum it is dramatically simpler than a multi menu, multi custom function modern Nikon or Canon DSLR. It also takes amazing pictures. The clarity and crispness is probably unparalleled and it has a full frame sensor with no crop factor. It also weighs a fraction of the amount of a pro DSLR and as I am using a 50mm lens, albeit quite a hefty one, this is a fraction of what I normally sling over my shoulder on a tripod. As this is supposed to be about birds and / or bugs here is an example of a shot taken with the new toy at F1.4, ISO 200, 1/1500 sec. The sharpness and colour are astounding.




By the way, this is a captive bird and not on the Hong Kong official list. It was seen outside Harrods.

The next shot shows the colour rendition and brightness in poor light.




And finally, to keep vaguely on the nature theme, our dog.



But the real bonuses this weekend were finding a Little bunting in the communal garden and seeing a flock of 64 Chinese goshawks migrating over the house. They were very, very high so this shot with the new Canon and a mere 400mm lens is no more than a record shot.




I suspect these birds were from Po Toi, where a major influx had been sighted by Geoff Welch earlier this week or they may just have been a smaller, later flock. Either way, it was sheer coincidence that I happened to be outside at the time and spotted, first, one, then two, then three then the big flock coming together over Shan Liu.

And if you can't tell one bunting from another, this is the Little bunting.



So even when the skies are grey we can still put on a happy face.

A grand night out or "It would be rude not to..."

The Three Men were not in a boat but in a dark wooded area somewhere in the hills behind Sai Kung. We started chez moi, where Mrs. Ha provided pumpkin soup and beef stroganoff sloshed down with green tea. The cool box was filled with fruit, water, some fizzy poison-ishy stuff and dare I say, beer. When I returned home at 1am everything was untouched. Except the beer.

We drove up to a clearing where we set up the lights and we waited. The weather was on the cool side of pleasantly warm. Or if you prefer, the warm side of pleasantly cool. It was dry over one trap and mizzly over the other. They were barely 50m apart. There was very little wind. In fact this was ideal moth weather. Around us the Brainfever bird called incessantly. Collared scops owls hooted and R swore he heard a Slaty-breasted rail. We were so remote that in the 5-6 hours we were on site not a car passed and not a soul walked past us. The only people likely to have done so were the boys in blue to be honest.

We had our regulation dull coloured clothing on except for M who had escaped from Stalag Luft Mandarin O and deserted his wife for the evening. Good man! The pale blue sweater was a great disguise.



And it attracted moths too.

Now I have to point out that R & M are rather expert with the leps, whilst I am a bumbling amateur. But be that as it may, we all set about the traps with equal gusto and the cameras were produced to keep digital records of the evening's catch. Occasionally, just occasionally, a particularly fine specimen would solicit a different reaction. The option existed not just to photograph the beasts but also to give them a more tangible chance of fame. Out would come a small plastic tube or pot and well, "it would be rude not to....."

Here are just a few of the close to 200 species seen yesterday evening.







I think it is fair to say that squeamishness and moths don't go hand in hand. They do tend to get in your hair, on your limbs, down your shirt, up your trouser leg and as poor old Colin Plant in VC 20 once discovered, they can dance a fine tarantella on your ear drum. How many men can boast of having been hospitalized by a Flame Shoulder? The trick is to make sure that all of the moths have been removed before you crawl into bed with your spouse in the early hours of the morning. I can testify from past experience that beetles are no more welcome in our marital bed than moths and I have NO idea how it got there!!

We ambled from trap to trap for about 5 hours, barely noticing the dampness of the air increasing. Some may have called it drizzle but we were too absorbed in doing a final check for exciting species. And the glorious thing about moths is that the small ones can be every bit as challenging and indeed beautiful as the big brutes. We had only one break and that was for R & M to savour the beer that reaches the moths other beers cannot reach. Somewhere R has a photo of a moth trying to sip a little for itself. I haven't seen the photo yet but I think the intruder was Plutodes flavescens.

Finally we did decide to pack down. The evening was over, camaraderie had reigned supreme, fine moths had been sampled, though net in the gourmetic sense, and all went home happy.......... with the exception of those lucky specimens, whose proud families may return one day to see their fallen relatives preserved for posterity.

If you think moth-ing is potentially for you (and you should, by jove) keep an eye out for National Moth Night. I am serious. There will be public sessions open even to the lowest of the riff-raff (that includes me) and you might even have time for a beer.

Cheers!

Moths are dull looking brown things - NOT

I am still checking whether this is Argina astrea or A. argus but whichever, it is a cracking moth! Enjoy.

Bonus bird

Amateurish Photography

Anybody who has followed my intermittent blogging may recall that my first camera was a Brownie Cresta 3. I used this for a while before being given my father's old Leica M3. From the ridiculous to the sublime! I moved through Canon SLRs to DSLRs and that is what I generally use today. I had a very brief dream of being a photo-journalist but the Career's Officer at school persuaded me that university was a good route to go and by the time I graduated I had drifted out of photography with any real intent. I have often dabbled but never seriously. I have recently begun to think about the world after work and taken my photography a little more seriously in the sense that I self-critique more. I delete more aggressively those images that are mediocre. I think more about light, exposure, composition and of course content. It is my sole creative outlet. My father was musical. He played piano well and as a boy was broadcast on the old Third Programme as his voice was compared to that of Ernest Lough. He loved the human voice and was a huge admirer of Kathleen Ferrier. I don't recall what sparked his interest in photography but he taught me to process my own black and white films and the bathroom served as a darkroom.

The book that started me thinking about photography differently was National Geographic - The Photographs. The haunting eyes of The Afghan Girl, captured for immortality by Steve McCurry, really gripped me. I still dream of taking such an iconic image. Look at Steve McCurry's blog to see just what a fine artist he is. But that was years ago and against all advice I tried to photograph birds instead. I had started birdwatching semi-seriously in the early 1990s as an antidote to The City. A professional bird photographer told me early on that you can't be a bird watcher and a bird photographer. Either or but not both. They are not compatible. I have spent 10 years trying to prove him wrong.

This week I spent a delightful morning at Mai Po (see previous post) and was then invited to join J&J to look for a nocturnal bird, Savanna nightjar. This was preceded by a potter around Long Valley and some tantalising views of Painted snipe, a bird I see regularly but which refuses point blank to strut its stuff in the open for me. So I end up with what I call "bird-in-habitat" shots and for which others have a different word. Birdwatching can take you to some odd places and so it was that we sought out the nightjar at what J assured me was the old grenade range. Happily this is a fairly off-the-beaten-track sort of place so little chance of young Johnny stepping on unexploded ordnance. Did I hear his mother whisper "shame"? As the light faded the calls started, described in the book as "a single piercing 'chweep' at short intervals". And then the first bird rose up. The silhouette of a nightjar is highly distinctive, like a flying anchor, almost falcon like. They are enchanting to watch but trying to get an autofocus to work in fading light is tricky and eventually (and too late) I switched to manual. Looking through the viewfinder of a camera you lose track rather of all that is happening but I guess there were 5 or six birds. They circled around and then moved away, hunting for their evening breakfast. Their whole performance lasted barely 10 minutes and I took 5 photographs. Two missed the bird completely, one was too small in the frame and the other two, though sharper were still in need of a decent crop to produce reasonable sized pictures. As J kindly said, "not bad for a first attempt". I think that is known as being damned with faint praise but he was right.

It is always more than somewhat depressing to review the images on the laptop when I get home. Invariably I find most of them destined for the trash basket. Some I hang on to in the hope that over time they will look better but without fail they look worse. DELETE! And so I need to do something different. Benjamin Franklin said, it is alleged, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." Already I have a couple of great suggestions from web-gurus.

The one I like best is from David duChemin at Pixelated Image.

It says: Stop buying new gear. That's it.

He does then continue and demand that instead you go out and take more pictures. Simple isn't it. Spending money or spending time practising. Hmmmm. Why did I just order that new Canon 1D mkIV body?

I have bought a couple of his $5 e-Books (does that count as buying gear?) and they are full of good ideas but the message I particularly liked is:

"Waiting is also a much under-rated photographic skill. Be patient, watch what happens, and be ready when it does. Don’t settle for good when waiting a few minutes might give you something truly revealing or great."

This is all about Cartier-Bresson's "decisive moment". In simple terms one moment is better than another and the difference may be a fraction of a second. In bird photography this is especially true. The turn of a head and the contact is lost, the catchlight in the eye is gone, the light has changed and on occasions, the bird flown. Portraits are nice, action shots are better. Action shots with a story to tell are better still. Sitting in a hide at Mai Po I often struggle with the conflict between singling out a bird and waiting for it to do something interesting or looking at the landscape and trying to catch the action as it happens. If I go for the latter I often find the bird I had, literally, been focussing on has gone. Such are the dilemmas of the photographer's life.

I am also learning about how much more Photoshop can do. Processing is an art in itself. But that's another blog. I'm off to take a load of images.

IMAGES TO CRITIQUE.......



Gloomy Day in Sai Kung




Savanna nightjar




Yellow-bellied prinia




Female Painted snipe

No Go Mai Po

Yesterday I had a rare trip to Mai Po and took some nice pictures, a few of which I shall inflict on you. Or you could just visit my Flickr page!

Today, however, a Swallow in Yuen Long has caused MPNR to be closed for 21 days. Many people much better qualified than I have articulated why this is a daft thing to do. Local experts Dr. Martin WIlliams and Mike Kilburn have both written on the matter. I really struggle to understand the mentality of the bureaucrats, who have no understanding of what they are doing. Are they going to impose a "no go" zone around the site, where the swallow was found? What else is now closed apart from bureaucrats' minds? Oh well, dose the idiots up with Tamiflu quick in case there is an outbreak of commonsense. If you read the WWF announcement I think it is fair to conclude that it too believes the closure is bonkers and completely unnecessary but it has to defer to the government and AFCD (the C is silent on most occasions). Frankly I'd me much in favour of WWF HK coming out and telling the government what they think. If Ricky Martin can come out, so can WWF HK.

So my plans for today have been aborted and we may go to the garden centre instead. Lets hope that hasn't been closed.

At this time of year the tides at MPNR are good and yesterday the predicted 2.3m tide brought the birds close to the hides. In fact the tide was probably higher than that although I haven't checked the Observatory site to confirm it. So, that means gulls and waders or "peeps" as our friends across the Atlantic insist on calling them.

Gulls are arguably the most challenging birds to identify although some may argue for raptors, cisticolas or indeed waders. They come in many shapes and sizes, take varying years to mature and have different plumages depending on age and season. A quick glance at "Gulls" by Klaus Malling Olsen and Hans Larsson makes my eyes glaze over. I am used to dealing with Greeks but Vega gulls baffle me. Now the more educated amongst my readers will observe that Vega is not a Greek letter but stop nit-picking. I am reminded of my father telling me the very old joke: What's a Greek Urn? About 40 drachma a week! I suspect I was five at the time and found it amusing. Well very little was amusing in 1962 so why shouldn't I laugh?

But I digress. Mai Po was at its best yesterday. Apart from the light, which for most of the morning was dreary. There is a real buzz to sitting in the hide and hearing the crescendo of a swish overhead. The birds fly in to see whether the tide has gone out enough for them to feed on the mudflats and as they do their recce you hear the wonderful noise of tens if not hundreds of them flying at great speed. One may be silent. Hundreds are not. When the main flocks arrive there may be hundreds of thousands of them densely dancing over Deep Bay, sometimes put up by an encroaching raptor (the Ospreys were at it yesterday) or by the tide forcing them off their chosen feeding grounds.

Furthest out are the ducks, Shoveler, Wigeon, Garganey..... then deep threads of black and white Avocets. There are gulls and of course "old carrot nose" himself, the Caspian tern. Look at this bird, what an absolute beauty.




There was also a single Gull-billed tern. But it is the overall experience that you go for. I cannot understand how people can sit behind a camera for hours and not be inspired.











And as a bonus, my first ever effort to video anything using a DSLR, the Canon 7D.



So is there anything bad about MPNR? Well the amount of building going on around the reserve is pretty awful. The buffer zone seems to be shrinking all the time. Road works seem to be everywhere and I have this nightmare that someone will decide that the Tower Hide is excellent potential for conversion into a town house or a number of bijou flats. (I'd like to credit JH for the word "bijou"). So in the event that some jobsworth behind a desk somewhere decides that it is safe to be within 3km of a wild bird I do recommend that you visit the reserve. Of course, if you are local that means going on an organised group trip at times that guarantee you'll see pretty much nothing BUT you could take up birding, join WWF HK, The HK Birdwatching Society and apply for permits and the you too can see the greatest show on earth. But please leave room for me and my camera. Thank you.

The Scarlet pimpernel??

After a trip to the Middle East with the world's worst airline - 7.5 hours of screaming babies (yes, plural) non stop and non sleep to HK - thank you CP - I spent a lazy day pottering about at home and clicking away at whatever visited the garden. Et voila!!

Actually there was a sort of hard work element to this. I went out at 6.15am when it was barely light. I hoped to see some early activity as the birds started to forage for breakfast. The light however was poor and did not improve, unlike the previous day when by 6.45 the sun was beginning to trickle through the dawn. So I climbed up and down the hill, became drenched in sweat and all for no pictures. The noise was there and I realised that cicadas call not only at dusk but also at dawn. The black ones with yellow spots seem to be everywhere. I found one on the balcony later on. It was confused by the glass panels so I lifted it up and allowed it to fly vigorously away, a veritable turbo charged cicada. What a great name for a car! Do you drive a Prius? No, I drive the new Toyota Cicada!! Ah, I wondered what the stridulations were. I though they were the brakes rubbing.

After that I was tired so set up the camera on the balcony and spent the day garden-watching on and off. The neighbours are already used to it. The minivets have been to the garden before but never come close. They sit in a tree on the far side of the communal garden, beyond the pots and veggie patch. Without warning one of the male minivets flitted across and perched atop the tree right opposite the house and almost caught me unprepared. I changed the settings quickly and fired off some nice portraits, pausing only very briefly to make sure the exposure settings were appropriate. If you get it wrong you may never get the chance again. I did miss 3 Hwamei on the path. I had been inside the house and as I came out I silently cursed as 3 beautiful birds flew off to the top of the garden. I was 99% sure they were Hwamei and a check with the binoculars confirmed this. I took a 400mm lens to try and stalk them amongst the empty flower pots but they skittled away under the hedge and out of sight.

The sun was shining by then and the warmth seems to have been a catalyst for the increased activity. It is also approaching the breeding season and I photographed a Red-whiskered bulbul carrying stalks of dead grass for the nest. The swallows still seem to be going in and out of the garage but I can't see a sign of construction. Perhaps they are still prospecting or maybe our activity bothers them more than last year's by the then tenants, S & K.

To close, I can disclose that the spellchecker rejects (maybe quite fairly) "stridulations" and suggests "story telling". So make your own mind up but the minivets are for real and I can think of no bird that creates such an impact as the Scarlet minivet. The colour is so in your face, it just punches you on the nose, demanding that you admire it. Black and red may not be the colours du jour but they put most fashion designers in their place. If you've got it, flaunt it and as red is the colour of my home nation's rugby shirts and the mighty Llanelli were known as the Scarlets (9-3) I hereby deem that the team shall henceforth be known as the Welsh Minivets. Diolch yn fawr.