After yesterday’s luck at the lake with Great Crested Grebes I went back again today for a couple of hours and was treated to a repeat performance.  After that is sitting in the cold for a couple of hours and getting a bit morose about the light dropping and everything getting rather grey.  Nevertheless, that’s all forgotten as soon as the action starts.  There are a couple of shots below.

It occurs to me that these photos are something of a positive sign.  As a kid, great crested grebes were quite a rare sight in England.  I can remember seeing my first sight of these birds, probably around the age of 10 or so, and being excited by the glimpse of this ‘rare’ bird.  Rare only because it had been driven to near extinction in Edwardian times because it’s crest feathers were prized hat decorations.  I prefer them where they are on the bird.  Now 40 years on, great crested grebes can be seen in many parts of the country.  Given a chance,  our wildlife is resilient and flexible; it just needs to be given space and some care.  

It has to be said that I’m really pushing the capability of my gear to the limit here.  For part of the time I used a 1.4 teleconverter to bring the birds closer in.  In dim light that makes getting sharp images really hard and, in the final analysis, it doesn’t really give better results than cropping directly from an image taken without the Teleconverter.  But I think these are interesting and worth sharing.