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!
