Firecrest! - on 20th January, 2020

The day after publishing my last blog post, in which I stated that I'd been having difficulty getting out, Lindsay stated that she felt in good enough condition to be left on her own for a while if I wanted to head out for a spot of birding for a few hours. So, having sorted out after lunch, I had a quick look at Birdguides, and saw that Firecrest had been seen for the preceding few days at Whitemoor Haye, which is only about 20 minutes from my home. 

To put things in perspective, Firecrest is far from common in the English Midlands but does get increasingly more common in the southern part of England. I have had only four previous sightings of Firecrest, and only managed any sort of photos on two of those occasions. For those of you not familiar with this bird and its behaviour, it is a tiny bird (sitting in size between Wren and Goldcrest - which is UK's smallest breeding bird) and has a reputation to be constantly flitting about in hedges and is, therefore, not an easy bird to photograph. 

I arrived in the area at around 13h40 and, as I approached in my car, was told that the bird had not been seen all day! However, as I arrived at the actual location, I was informed that it had been seen a few minutes earlier but had disappeared into an inaccessible area behind the hedge.

The road is a narrow single-track road and so I had to go a few hundred metres up the road to find somewhere where I could park my car. I then started walking back towards the group, but had only gone a few metres before a fellow coming the other way said he'd just seen a small bird flitting around in the hedge. I soon spotted it, and it was the Firecrest. Waving arms brought the group to us and I enjoyed a session of just over an hour in the company of this bird.

With it flitting about incessantly, all we photographers were having a difficult time getting shots, particularly as it spent virtually all of its time working the far side of the hedge and, when it did come into view for a second or two, it was unpredictable as to whether it would be against a light or dark background. My photos are, therefore, not good. Here's the first shot I managed to fire off!

Firecrest (Regulus ignicapilla) - Whitemoor Haye

Subsequent shots were equally mediocre, but are included here as I have never done any better with this species.

Firecrest (Regulus ignicapilla) - Whitemoor Haye

This state of affairs continued for quite some time and the bird was starting to roam further away from us, favouring a tree probably around 20 metres behind the hedge. I was standing alone in a spot where I could observe it in the distance, when it flew into the hedge directly in front of me - and started to preen! It stayed in one spot for a full 12 seconds - I have never seen this species stay in one spot for so long -  but the other people looking for it just couldn't get there before it departed again. It wasn't ideally positioned, but here are a few from that interlude:-

Firecrest (Regulus ignicapilla) - Whitemoor Haye

After over an hour of almost continual waving the camera around, my arms were aching and it was time to depart as I felt I was unlikely to get any better shots, with the bird getting more and more elusive.

I did stop a little way down the road at Croxall Lakes and spent some time in one of the hides there, and this might feature in a future post, although nothing outstanding was seen.

I'd had an extremely enjoyable afternoon and felt that I'd maximised my freedom with a Firecrest being a real highlight from a birding point of view, even if the photography wasn't all it might have been.

Thank you for dropping by. I'm not sure when my next blog post will be, or what the subject matter might be either. The weather forecast does not look too good for the next five days, with wind and rain featuring for much of the time.

P.S. Around the Whitemoor Haye area there are several other places named XXX Haye or XXX Hay, and I was curious to know what the meaning of Haye was. It seems that it is derived from an Old English word for hedge and means 'enclosed field'. Such enclosures were often where deer were kept over winter for the supply of venison.