Sunday Down The Vale

The sun was out this morning after a few days of what was at times torrential rain, so I decided a first visit for a couple of weeks to the Vale was in order.

I had a very pleasant morning photographing some of the more common, but none the less photogenic species.
There are certain species that a lot of photographers overlook because they feel that they are too common and therefor not very exciting.
I've never fully understood this logic because even the most numerous everyday species can be an excellent subject if you capture it doing something unusual.

A point in case maybe is this shot of a Black-Headed Gull from this mornings session.
He wasn't doing anything other than standing on a post overlooking the main Mill Pond, but I still fired a few shots at him anyway...He was fairly close and you never quite know what you will get.
After a few seconds the Gull opened his beak as wide as he could to yawn and I managed to capture this portrait which I'm sure you will agree is a lot more interesting than it would have been if he hadn't of yawned!
One nice thing about photographing the more common birds is a lot of them are used to humans and quite often are even curious of us.
This Blackbird seemed to be the curious type...

It's actually quite curious to why certain animals are curious of us and when you point a large lens at them ,some run in fear and some come for a closer look.
Like this Grey Squirrel...

It was a day of curiosities and this normally very shy Magpie was on the cautious side of curious and spent a full five minutes edging closer towards me, stopping every now and them to assess the situation...

Snow!

Today, the plan was to have another attempt at the Mountain Hares in the High Peak, but once again I was foiled by the weather!

Light overnight snow locally and a forecast of fog and heavy snow in the Peaks were enough to make my mind up.

It's been very frustrating lately...Just when you think it's safe to make plans, this very hard winter bites back at you!

I probably won't get another chance to get up into Derbyshire again for a couple of weeks...Weather permitting, I'm off on a couple of trips to Merseyside next weekend and I'm also hoping to get some more shots of the Little Owls if we have some sunshine in the next few days.

So just a short walk down the Vale in the snow this morning and despite the weather, there was plenty of activity in the hedgerows...