Snipe and Starlings

This week I returned to Leighton Moss on a pleasant dry afternoon. There were surprisingly few cars at the Morecambe pools car park and most of the time there were very few visitors.I joined a fellow photographer from Penrith and we enjoyed some super views of the large numbers of common snipe currently on the shore pools.
We were kept busy trying to capture the behaviour of the snipe as they fed and preened within range of the big lenses.

I have shown above some of my better efforts and was particularly pleased with the ones showing the not very often seen orange tail feathers as they preened. There were between forty and fifty snipe on view and at times they came out and fed in the open but at the slightest sign of danger they would quickly return to the cover of one of the small islands at the Eric Morecambe hide.

I spent some time observing and photographing the snipe and as dusk was fast approaching I left to see if I could catch sight of the starlings as they came into roost.Itwas not easy to find the best spot to observe the starlings but I finally went up to the far end of the reserve and watched them from the roadside by Island Mere.The rain was beginning to arrive but I managed one or two shots before it became too dark. On one of the images above a mass of starlings can be seen with the four o'clock train to Barrow just visible below. All in all it had been an excellent afternoon session at Leighton Moss and I look forward to some better images of the impressive starling roost in the weeks to come.