South Wales - 15 July

Today I followed in Mark's footsteps to South Wales for a session at Ian Howells' woodland hide setup which has started attracting a juvenile Sparrowhawk as well as some other but so far regrettably much less reliable larger raptors.

An early start was needed as I had agreed to meet Ian at 07:00, but it proved to be a good day with four visits from the Sparrowhawk with two of these lasting for more than 30mins. Just as I was about to leave a Buzzard landed momentarily of one of the perches, at a distance of about 4m, before flying off. Unfortunately I didn't have time to adjust the zoom and take any shots. Two days later apparently there was an even better visitor in the form of a Goshawk that actually stayed to have its photo taken by one very very lucky photographer! It hasn't returned while anyone has been in the hide since...

Here is a selection of the photos I took that day, starting with a couple of my attempts at capturing some action (which isn't was most seem to do).

For a gallery of all my photos from this session, with links to larger images, go to this page on my website.