Long-tailed tits feeding together

Helena has gone on an expedition to Gloucester, and by mid-afternoon I was regretting not having joined her. I knew there a sunny period was forecast for the middle of the day, and when it came I was pre-occupied and didn't notice.

I noticed the sun was already setting behind Rodborough Common on the top of the hillside on the far side of the Golden Valley. I poked my head out of the upstairs rear window, where my computer resides, and saw a buzzard flying only about fifty feet above the rear gardens. I grabbed my camera and took some poor shots of it as it floated round in gentle circles to rise up out of the valley. A couple of revolutions later and it had gone from sight over the rooftops.

I kept looking out of the window and noticed the weak late afternoon sunlight was bringing a little colour into the garden and that many birds were intent on feeding. A jay flew out of a thicket and up into the sycamore tree and then proceeded to various vantage points around the gardens. Magpies, pigeons, robins, goldfinches, blackbirds, and even a sparrowhawk appeared up on high.

I went downstairs to make a cup of tea which I took outside onto the patio, where I tried to blend in, but the rain started falling again and I retreated into the cabin. With the door open I could watch the feeders and I went out into the rain a couple of times to record particular birds. A nuthatch evaded me, unsurprisingly, by hiding behind branches, and then flying away on the far side of the fence.

I have always really liked long-tailed tits, much as I love goldfinches, because of their habit of flocking and singing together. They appear in the gardens most days, but seem to take a swing around the wider neighbourhood a great deal. For some time I've been trying to film a flock of them feeding together, so this is today's attempt. It was getting steadily darker and so I pumped up the ISO to levels I never normally choose. But I thought I would see if I could still catch them in flight despite rather too low shutter speed. I'm not giving up my quest, although I do quite like this picture of six of them, nearly all of them doing different things together.