Sunday, 27 May 2018

Estonia May 2018 Part 6. Dinner is served!

After a beautiful night's sleep in my exceptionally comfortable bed I don't think I'll ever take such a simple pleasure for granted ever again still, I was wide awake quite early and so decided to head back to our new hide. Mike on the other hand had decided to wander around the reedbeds using the car as a hide. He must have fared better than I did as my best shot of the session was a distant cow wading through the wet field!
Pikla
Disappointing but my spirits were lifted by an excellent cooked breakfast and the announcement that we would get dinner tonight after all.Husband was going to cook for us but informed us his skills were limited. He could make us pasta with Bolognaise sauce or Meatloaf. We left him to decide , we were happy just to get something hot to eat.
Once again the sun was blazing down and gave us the usual problems, Earlier though I had managed my first images of Lesser Whitethroat for the year
Lesser Whitethroat   Sylvia curruca
But trying to get anywhere near the Garganey on the pools was near impossible. They flew the minute you tried.
Garganey (Anas querquedula
We decided to explore the coast further north to see what we could find and from a listing point of view it was quite successful, Grey Partridge and Short Eared Owl being the standouts but I also managed some more images for my Big Photo Year too.
Just four juvenile Whooper Swans , the rest must have flown north by now.
Whooper Swan  Cygnus cygnus
and some more Goosander shots.
Goosander   Mergus merganser
There were certainly plenty of them about in Estonia.
The main attraction though was to return to the pop-up hide to see if we could better the previous day's efforts. Unfortunately we couldn't. The one we'd named Blackie turned up but there was no sign of Ginger at all. A third male also made the occasional visit but he had no interest in displaying at all, he was more concerned with hunting for flies. 
Ruff
With dinner due at 20.00pm we decided to call it a day and had actually got out of the hide when a few males landed some 100m away and were quite active lekking. There we were stood out in the open too! 
Ruff
We decided we might as well try and get closer, nothing to loose now. 
Ruff
Surprisingly we halved the distance and so managed to get some reasonable images but nothing to rival the previous evening's efforts. 
Ruff
Ah well, at least we did get something out of the visit to Pikla. We decided to knock down the hide and ask if we could take it to Kosmonautika the following day.
Dinner was accompanied by a few beers and in fairness the Pasta Bolognaise was pretty good. A little salty perhaps but that just increased our thirst for cold beers.
We spent the last hour of sunshine sitting on the patio as the huge golden orb slipped in to the sea just as it had done the night before too.
Pikla
If you think the horizon isn't level what else would you expect from a photographer under the influence?
It was pure bliss sat out there and I had to capture the moment. Mind you I think our wives were a little envious of our weather when they saw the pictures.
TBC

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