On Tuesday of this week news started to filter out of a Little Crake at Linford Lakes Nature Reserve on the outskirts of Milton Keynes. Potentially this would be another UK tick for me in what has already been an exceptional year. I however had other more important priorities in the middle of the week, i.e. spending time with my gorgeous little 11 month old Grandson in Manchester!
Friday was hence the first day I could go and so, buoyed by good pictures posted on social media of what is normally a shy and reclusive bird, I set off on the 2 hour drive to Milton Keynes. Linford Lakes Nature reserve is owned and managed by the parks trust. I learnt later that this was set up when the town was first created and 10% of all land has to be given to them by property developers – what an excellent scheme! Access to the site is normally by permit only but the volunteers had kindly arranged managed access on a couple of days in return for a £5 donation. Friday was a normal members permit only day so I purchased an annual pass online for a very reasonable £20 – also good incentive to visit again!
On arrival I made my way to the designated Otter hide where, not too surprisingly, it was standing room only. The Little Crake had showed well but distantly before I arrived so I settled in for what I suspected would be a long wait. After an hour or so a bench seat became available and I sat down next to my friend Ewan from Oxon. Time seems to run slowly, almost at a glacial pace, in such circumstances. Was it really only 10 minutes since I last checked the time of my phone? It felt more like a hour brain time! Then at last I managed to see the Little Crake scuttle across a gap in the reeds before vanishing again as quickly as it had appeared. I was reminded of my twitch to see a Spotted Crake a few years back – 8 hours in a cold hide for one partially obscured 5 second view!
The hours drifted on without any further sign of our shy and elusive cranky friend. Someone in the hide tried to cheer us all up by saying that it always appeared in front of the hide at 3 pm. I think I’m normally a cup half full sort of guy but I didn’t hold out much hope that our diminutive feathered friend would be so punctual. But, blow me down with a feather (sic), just after 3 pm someone said “there it is in front of the hide” and, sure enough there it was scuttling through the reeds on the edge of the lake. It clearly was a master of stealth and had somehow crept right in front of us without anyone noticing!
The Little Crake in real life is very much what it says on the tin, a small bird only 18cm or so in length making it comparable in size to our common House Sparrow. It can be found in the spring and summer in its reed bed breeding habitat from eastern Europe through to western Asia. It is migratory wintering in Africa. Our bird is a juvenile, i.e hatched this year. Now I know I’m a little biased but it really had an understated attractiveness. In common with other reed sulkers, it had disproportionally large yellow feet, ideal for grasping reed stems. With a short straight yellow bill with red base, and subtle brown shading on its body it sulked through the reeds pecking continuously as it moved, presumably eating insects and other aquatic goodies. Most of the time it was partially obscured by reeds but it did come out pretty much into the open on one occasion. It continued its hyperactive journey through the reeds before exiting stage right of the hide. We hoped it would turn around and make its way back in the same manner, but, to everyone’s surprise, it flew in front of the hide and disappeared again into the reeds on the left of us. That was pretty much the cue for everyone to leave the hide, a long 5 hour wait made worth while by 10 minutes of the Crake in front of the hide – it’s a funny old hobby!
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| A more typical view! |
I had an issue with the R5 on my last outing. When the mode was set to AV the timer was on and it would only take one picture every ten seconds. I couldn’t sort it out in the field so changed to a pre-set custom mode. When I got home try as I might using the online manual and other helpful web sites I could not get the timer off. In the end I resorted to a complete camera reset which cured the problem but lost the many custom settings I had. It took several hours to set the camera up again but when I looked at the Little Crake pictures there were two major issues. Firstly the camera was in one shot mode. With a mirrorless camera and no shutter noise this is not so obvious in the field and what would normally have been several hundred images turned out to be just 20. Very fortunately there were a few reasonable shots in amongst the twenty. Secondly, the camera was set to save images as JPEG’s rather than my normal RAW. I don’t understand this as I’m almost positive I had reset it to RAW. The issue here is the JPEG format seriously limits the amount of post processing you can do with many of the Lightroom features greyed out. While you gain in file size with the JPEG format you lose a huge amount of image data. Basically the JPEG algorithm reduces the file size by integrating over a number of pixels to give an average. What this means is that, if for example the JPEG is 10 times smaller than the original, each individual pixel is the result of averaging 10 pixels in the original image. The actual JPEG conversion algorithm is a little more sophisticated than this crude averaging but the resulting loss of image data and the limits this imposes on post processing remain. Again, luckily, the JPEGS were pretty good and required only minimal post processing after cropping but that’s a mistake I won’t make again!
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