Turnstones in Dorset on a pebble beach. One of the U.K's easist wader to photograph

Now this morning I'm having a go at photographing turnstones. I think turnstones and sandaling are the two most frequently photographed waders because they're very numerous and very tame and approachable. So they're coming very close to me but I've been here now an hour and a half. I don't think I've taken a worthwhile picture yet. They are not posing. Everything's wrong as well. Well not everything. The thing that's right is we've got a little bit of a rise in the pebble beach here. So I'm trying to photograph them on the top of that rise with water behind it. And if I'd have been here early enough I'd have had no wind blowing at dawn and the colour in the water would have been brown. It would have been very attractive behind the pebble beach. But I didn't get here very early because the motorway was closed. There'd been an accident. I'd probably lost an hour and a half I think before the police turned everybody around and you had to drive the wrong way up the motorway to get off it. So I wasn't here early enough. The light has now gone cloudy. It's not as colourful as it would have been at dawn. So I've missed the best of it. Just been trying to get something out of the day. Now I know I'm not being particularly successful. There's too much to go wrong here. We've got all those swans and gulls in the background and that keeps creating a distraction. We've got the bridge reflecting the water, that blue signpost in the distance and then people keep walking along the shoreline which creates a reflection in the water too. The birds just haven't been posing. They've just been too active. Keep turning their heads away from the usual frustration. It's just been worse than normal this morning. But it's noticeable now they're slowing down. It must be very close to high tide. The water's coming up around my stool at the moment. So you'll see them starting to look for somewhere that's just going to sit the high tide out and there's less and less gravelly beach for them to be standing on. Very early on I decided this was not a good place for video. Too many distractions. You've got to get at least a 20 second clip of video and in that time they're going to have a swan swim past them or a person walking across the beach. So I'll stick to still photography. I've only got to get it right for a fraction of a second. Now I like the pebbly beach and the colours of it but I really wanted just a brown background. Now that background is a reflection in the water of the far beach and if the wind wasn't blowing it would be all brown. As it is it's broken up and we've got bits of blue. Nothing really wrong with it, just not what I wanted. The tide was coming in fast. I'm gonna have to move. I'm starting to get wet. Well now there's only the rocks that they can land on and I've actually enjoyed the last five minutes of photography more than the rest of it. I've actually got some decent poses on the rocks. Lots of people about and you've got to put up with that because that's why these birds are tame. They're so used to people. I didn't mind the reflection at this point when it was about a 50-50 divide between the sand reflection and the silvery water. That looked okay and on the rocks I could get that brown background occasionally. I do like to see the bird's feet though so they're hidden by the rock. He's got to come forward a little bit like that and now I can zoom in and I make good use of the zoom. I'm zooming backwards and forwards all the time when I'm photographing. At one point a lady came up to me and told me she feeds the turnstones here almost every day. Turnstone's one of the few waders that people have started to feed because they're found right in the centre of our seaside resorts. They've started to eat our discarded fish and chips and other scraps and so people have got into the habit of feeding them now. She's obviously not a photographer as she wouldn't have put the food down there. It's not the most attractive place but look how persistent these birds are. Backwards and forwards not at all bothered really by people. The tide kept coming in. There's about 30 cars parked along this road including mine and there's still another 40 minutes to high tide so I decided to move. The following day I decided to go across to Brownsea the largest of the islands in Pool Harbour. It's owned by the National Trust and it's not really that cheap to get to. You have to pay for the boat trip across. If you're not a member of the Trust you've got to pay an entry fee and on top of that you've got to pay to park in the town of Pool which is not cheap. There's a large lagoon on the island which has two hides both of which are well worth visiting. This little egret is taken from the turn hide. Now during the breeding season there are a lot of sandwich turns breeding here but they've had to put this netting around them because the seeker deer come across and destroy all the eggs. A green shank coming in front of the haverset hide. It's not every day you get the chance to photograph green shank. The weather wasn't great. It was very overcast in fact it rained most of the time. I do like colour in my pictures and here we have a red shank and this was a bit odd. I thought this bird was injured at first. It's a red shank but no it got up and moved off very happily. There were both bar-tailed and black-tailed godwits there but only the black tail came close enough to the hide and lots of haversets. Doesn't seem that long ago when haversets were really rare birds but now they're quite widespread. They are to be found on many of our nature reserves. It's a large lagoon stretching as far as that green bank and beyond it you've got the sea of Pool Harbour. A lot of spoonbills were present. It's another bird that's been doing quite well and it's a species that loves to groom itself. It's very common to see spoonbills mutually grooming each other. I'm going to finish off by showing you some pictures of a spoonbill I took in 2018 in Spain in the vicinity of the Coto Doñana National Park. Now I've been to this national park many times. It's very famous but I've always found it quite restrictive photographically. There's not much access to the land apart from in one fairly remote corner where I've actually done very well over the years. So I was driving along this dirt track in my car with a water channel by the side of it and I came across a spoonbill down in this channel. I pulled up in the car and started taking pictures. I was quite happy because these at that time were probably the best spoonbill pictures I've got. I've done them quite well since but the only thing I didn't like is I'm looking down at the bird too much. I don't like looking down. I want to be level with the bird. Now over a period of about 30 minutes on two occasions this bird disappeared. It went up the channel, I couldn't see it anymore, five minutes later it would come back again. So the third time it disappeared up the channel I jumped out of the car grabbed the big lens and a bean bag and ran down into the channel and lay on the ground. And I said this many times on YouTube if you lie down low you'll just look like a log to a bird and they take no notice of you. So the bird came back and he just kept walking towards me and he came closer and closer and this was before the age of the modern zoom where I could zoom back. I was shooting with a 300 f4 lens wonderful lens but I want to be able to zoom back he's too big in the frame now and eventually he started to become suspicious of me but he just turned around and walked away. Thanks for watching.