Sunday, November 21, 2010

Quite rare in the Netherlands, extremely rare in the west part of the country, normally you only find this in Limburg and the Ardennes in Belgium/Luxembourg.
Nice bird to watch, very active and still tame enough to approach closely. Constantly in and out of the water. I've seen it fly trough a cascade of water to search for food behind it.

I found this bird via the website waarneming.nl where twitchers post all sorts of bird sightings. This one was spotted in a nature reserve where I walk almost every weekend.

Because I had 2 dozen confirmed sightings to work with it was extremely easy to pick an area to start searching for it. Right at the edge of that area I noticed 6 other bird enthousiast staring at something. Bingo! There it was darting in an out of the water. The 6 gave up rather quickly muttering something about a more tame second dipper that was supposed to be in the area. I walked to the other side of the clearing where the bird was and just waited leaning against a tree. Took about 10 minutes before it came close to me while foraging. I even managed a second shot when it had caught something.

waterspreeuw / white-throated dipper

Of course I'm not entirely satisfied with these shots. A grey, misty morning is not the best time to get enough light, let alone nice and warm light which does birds a lot more justice. I also wished for more tele than my 70-300VR provides. Despite that I think I did well and I got to shoot my first truly rare bird.

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