This is a female Chaffinch a small common finch in the UK.   At feeders they don't often perch  but instead, either feed on any spilt seed on the ground beneath the feeders or hover and try to grab a grain of seed in flight.  This provides a really good photographic opportunity if you are interested in birds in flight…..as I am.   As you probably know, to freeze flapping and fluttering wings without blur you need to have the fastest shutter speed possible, only available in really good light.  With the advent of the latest digital cameras its possible to achieve 1/4000th of a second which is the speed you need to achieve anything worth keeping.  You will also need to take hundreds of photos in a session and then, out of that,  you may finish up with 1 or 2 percent that you are happy with.  I have to say that I am extremely happy with this photo, just one out of 300!

In this photograph,  two male Greenfinch are engaged in a spat and I mangaed to get a nice photograph of the action.   I don't normally include photographs of birds on feeders as they are not particuarly photogenic but today, I have decided to make an exception.

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Greenfinches are a species of bird that hasn't done too well over the last 5 years but it's good to see them seemingly doing a little better now. The males and females are quite easy to separate and in the next picture you can clearly see the difference……female on the left.

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On my recent trip to Sri Lanka……hundreds more photos to sort through by the way, I was struck yet again at how easy it is to forget to photograph the common birds, thinking that , "oh well I will photograph them tomorrow" and in the end you never do. By the same token, birds that we take for granted here are largely ignored by photographers and for sure, by the twitchers. I am thinking of Starlings, our common finches of course and in particular our Moorhen and Coot. Well its worth remembering that to people from other countries, a Greenfinch would be a brilliant bird to see.  In Sri Lanka the White breasted Hen is the Moorhen equivalent and I well remember how excited a professional guide in Sri Lanka became at the sight of a Eurasian Coot!   So I have made a vow to photograph common birds whenever I see them.  To that end here is one of our most familiar UK birds the humble Moorhen. A very attractive bird when you take a second glance.

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Shame about the Electric Fence warning. …….oh, and here's a Great Spotted Woodpecker, this one is a female, she came down to the feeders regularly while I was waiting to photograph the small finches. This is the UK's commonest woodpecker species.  Female's are distinguished by the absence of red on the head by the way.  All in all, a pleasant but freezing cold morning and a nice way to ease my way back into birding and photography on an English winter's day.  Not as exotic as Sri Lanka, but if you were are Sri Lankan birder you would say exactly the opposite!

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