I spent about forty minutes in Hillers’ bird hide this afternoon, before meeting R in the café for a late lunch. Sadly, thanks to last year’s brutal tree felling on the Ragley estate, the woodland clearing no longer attracts the range of wildlife it used to, but Hillers are doing their best to compensate for the destruction by putting out bird feeders and ground food. They’ve posted a notice by the doorway of the hide promising that the estate will shortly be replacing the felled trees with oaks, which I’m confident will completely restore the natural environment… in a hundred years or so.
Anyway, the clearing was busy with birds, and even if the majority were Goldfinches, feasting on the sunflower hearts put out by Hillers, it was still nice to see them. I was even happier to spot some young Greenfinches and Chiffchaffs among the more usual suspects, but none of them offered a good photo opportunity. In fact only a handful of birds gave me what I was looking for, which was a clear portrait against a clean background, and of those this little Wren was my favourite. As their binomial name suggests, Wrens (Troglodytes troglodytes) are quite secretive birds who spend much of their time rummaging about in the undergrowth, and it’s unusual to see one this close to the hide, so even as I pressed the shutter button I knew that if the resulting image was sharp it was likely to be my photo of the day.
