Great bustard

I got up at oh-no-surely-not-hundred hours this morning, to drive to Wiltshire for a wildlife photography workshop on Salisbury Plain. This was set up by the RPS Nature Group, and was run by Robert Harvey, ably assisted by Alan Benson.

Over the course of six hours, from 6am to noon, my birding year list improved by six species, of which this great bustard was undoubtedly the star. Hunted to extinction in the UK by 1832, the great bustard has been slowly and painstakingly reintroduced to Salisbury Plain over the past twenty five years by a largely voluntary organisation called the Great Bustard Group. Because they’re wild birds and roam freely over the Plain, and seemingly prefer to hang around in the MOD impact area which is out of bounds to civilians, it’s difficult to be sure how many bustards there now are, but even if the GBG’s estimate of one hundred is optimistic, there are certainly several dozen. Our workshop group saw upwards of twenty today, and even witnessed - at a huge distance - some of the lekking behaviour for which this species is well known. Because my vastly cropped images don’t do this performance any kind of justice, I recommend you to take a look at a film of the event, made a couple of years ago by Alan Benson.

My second image tonight is a brown hare that was spotted as we drove past it by the sharpest-eyed person in the car, despite the very creditable impersonation it was doing at the time of a small boulder. Having photographed it in boulder mode with no difficulty, when it decided to cut and run I managed just one reasonable shot, and this is it.