At last – A Tern for the good

Caspian Tern

 At Last?

Persistently, or some might say more correctly, stupidly, I finally succeeded in getting the Caspian Tern and a life tick at Frampton on Tuesday at the third attempt.  The bird has been at Frampton Marshes RSPB in Lincolnshire on and off for the past couple of weeks but it has the habit of disappearing off somewhere for extended periods, sometimes for the whole day, presumably to feed. My past two visits have coincided with its longer absences. 

So with more hope than expectation I set off from home at 05:30 on Tuesday morning and arrived at Frampton just after 08:00. I had a quick unsuccessful look for it from the visitor centre by the car park and then set off on the 10 minute walk to a viewing hump on the north side of the reed-bed lagoon.  There were a couple of birders already there and they pointed the bird out to me siting in a distant flock of Godwits fast asleep – on this occasion it was as easy as that!

Caspian Terns are the largest members of the Tern family and have a large but scatted distribution being present in all continents except the Antarctic. They are mainly found in Europe in the Baltic and Black sea area and are comparatively rare vagrants to the UK with a small number of sightings most years.

For the next 2 hours it slept, preened for a few moments and then fell asleep again. I really wanted to get a view of the Tern in flight and just as I was about to give up something disturbed the Godwits, which took flight, and the Tern followed suite. Although being comparatively large it lacked none of the elegance and grace of its smaller family members as it flew leisurely closer to us and landed amongst a flock of feeding Dunlin.

Scanning the closer area of the lagoon in front of me also yielded two Curlew Sandpipers in amongst the  Dunlin flock, one still largely in its rusty brown summer plumage. Also present as a nice diversion were a flock of 13 Spoonbill alternatively feeding and sleeping while standing on one leg as is their uncomfortable looking habit. Not so many years back Spoonbills were very rare birds in the UK but now a small but growing number are resident and have successfully bred in the past few years. Climate change has some winners and along with other members of the heron family they are expanding their rage northwards and westwards into the UK.

I learned from other birders present that two Wood Sandpipers were showing quite well on a small stretch of water beyond the 360-degree hide. These are normally an annual tick for me but were missing from this year’s much-reduced list. On arrival at the designated spot I had good and prolonged scope views of an adult and juvenile but they were too far away for photographs so here is one I took earlier!

If truth be told, I’ve been struggling a little bit with the settings on my new 1Dx mark 3 camera, particularly the autofocus.  The autofocus is very sophisticated and claimed by Cannon to be the best on any camera they have every produced.  I think this is part of the problem as there are just too many settings to play around with. I started off just using center spot focusing but this seemed to be underplaying the strength in depth of the autofocus and todays pictures were taken with a small cluster of AF points around the center with some tweaking of other settings such as tracking. I’m not particular happy with the results which seemed a bit soft even though the camera had locked on. In fairness white birds in strong light can be troublesome to photograph in a number of ways and these images are heavily cropped. The AF works by maximizing contrast, which is intrinsically difficult with a white bird. Strong sunlight also tends to burn out any subtle detail and it is very easy to overexpose the shot. I haven’t yet calibrated the body on my lens using the micro-focus adjustment facility, which I will do but, in my previous experience, this only results in a small improvement on focus and would not explain the softness of today’s results. So it’s back to single center spot autofocusing for the time being while I study the manual more- good job I’m retired!

Footnote – my blogs are posted with sometimes rather imaginative spelling and grammar due to my extreme dyslexia!