Sunday 11 May 2014

Beverley - Hoopoe in between showers

It could have been the archetypal 'Vicars lawn' and classic habitat for one of the most iconic birds to accidentally reach our shores! The owners of Barn Cottage, in the sticks just outside Beverley, had kindly allowed birders to twitch a Hoopoe which had taken a liking to the various grubs in the lawn.....



I was itching or twitching for a day out and having given Ian Grant a call, we decided to nip up the road to East Yorks and arrived during a torrential downpour!

We hadn't missed a lot as the Hoopoe had been sheltering from the elements for most of the day and with less than ten birders on site at any one time, it was a pretty relaxed scene.....


Not the most 'needy' bird to twitch, I sense you thinking but.... it was obliging and when I think back to the various Hoopoes I'd seen, unlike them, this was going to enter frame filling territory? That is - if it showed?!!!

The sun popped out and.... so did the Hoopoe!



It then decided to do what comes naturally to a Hoopoe -  play to the gallery by cleaning up bugs from the lawn ad nauseum - the ideal lawn scarifier if ever I saw one? But before the bug shots (part two) here's the bird just generally showing off!






Close up work.....




There's a pretty limited options to vary the capture the bird when resting. so....


I was trying to find more offbeat moments?


And angles!

Looking backwards?


And preening is always 'different'....



But of course, the reason it was here - was for food!


Plenty of it.....


And in part two - the passage of food from bill to throat!