Feldberger Seenlandschaft – Day 2

White-tailed eagle

In the morning we go out again to see whether the white-tailed eagle named Aalfred would come to grab some lure. Lucky we were seeing him in the trees where he normally sits and waits. Once Fred is shouting and throws the eel out, he really takes off and grabs the fish.

Unfortunately my camera went out of focus while he was touching the water and it felt like an eternity before I got it back.

Aalfred then carried the eel over to the aerie – probably to try getting his female attracted by this present. Once he sat there, one of the rivals showed up and finally both disappeared in the distance.

While this was happening the female with the third(?) male were “flirting” on the other side of the lake.

While Fred was trying to attract the female with an eel, a black kite showed up but he did not make true attempts to grab the fish; just flying around the boat for a while.

 

Day session at the hide

After we had breakfast we went to the Kingfisher hide to spot a pair of Kingfishers. The hide is ready for 2 people and nicely built having also the nest pipes built into the hide. If one of the birds was inside we could hear him preparing the nest.

As time went by and nothing happened, I mounted my Sigma 150-600 plus TC-1401 on my Nikon D7200 to grab a white wagtail in around 20 meter distance.

Of course while having this monster setup the Kingfisher came by and sat on the wood. Distance around 4 meters. I managed to get some viable pictures but I was truly aiming for some better ones.

The female also dropped by and they exchanged the wedding present. And I was still having this monster lens mounted…

Lucky we were, after some time they came over again and I was much better prepared using the D800 and the Nikkor 200-400 once and later the D4 with the Nikkor 500. The quality of those images is far better of course.

Also used my D4 to do a short movie of one of the Kingfishers.

The camera which is audible is the one of my neighbor.

Evening session

Second time for a boat ride to the kite action. Again we left around 4pm and went to the Schmaler Luzin area where the kites are. I setup my camera to use max ISO 3200 while trying to keep minimum shooting time at 1/2500 sec. The results are better but still not impressive. Need some more training for such things…

The kites are so damn fast. As shown above, the camera was doing 11 pictures per second with 1/2500 sec exposure time. One can see how far the kite got during 2 shots.