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Finally! I managed to get the camera with me again last Sunday when I went to the river for some early shots. Early? Well, it was 9 am, which wouldn’t qualify as early for any real nature photographer – but surprisingly to me the river was still in the shadows without any sun coming down on the water’s surface, and given the temperature of -18° C we had had the morning before I was expecting some serious frost. The water did create some nice fog floating and flowing over the surface due to the cold as I had hoped for, the lack of any water fowl being a willing model swimming through the misty clouds for the benefit of a nice photo did provide me with some disappointment, though

Here is a photo of the little cascade emitting mist, slightly desaturated processing.

My first encounter was a tree creeper, and this time I could map him to some pixels – and now inspecting his image imprint, I am still unsure about him being Certhia familiaris or Certhia brachydactyla, the short toed version that seems to be more probable. Inspecting the photo closely, I can’t find his toe to be short in any sense of the word, but still more hints point at the short-toed brachydactyla than the Eurasian Treecreeper (German Waldbaumläufer) familiaris.

Later up on the bank I did encounter the little Goldcrests again I had first experienced the day before the bird census, and I was lucky enough they got down in the large trees to maybe 2 to 3 meter height, scanning the tree’s little twigs and branches for anything left for breakfast.

Now, my book states the Goldcrest is the smallest bird of Europe, but certainly it is not the slowest. These critters move fast enough to make even Spielberg’s velociraptor blush, and they tend not to stay still long enough for the autofocus to catch up, nor were they employing any – at least for me – predictable movement pattern.

Frantically, I snapped, constantly hoping to get the autofocus on the spot before the next jump of the little one. Outcome? Well, I declare my Sigma 100-300/f4 as winner, even if it came at a price: I pressed the shutter 37 times. Of these 37 images, 4 do not contain a goldcrest at all. Grunt. Of the remaining 33, 3 have a goldcrest colored blur, and 28 goldcrests out of focus.

This left me 2 keepers, and the tree creeper!

Technical data: Nikon D300 with Sigma 100-300/f4 at 240mm, aperture priority mode in matrix mode set to f6.3, ISO 640, resulting in 1/250s shutter speed. And yes, no image stabilizer available. Yikes. The relatively long expose of 1/250s could have screwed me, but it seems the “1/focal length” rule still applies – the bad images are not bad because of my excitedly shaking hands, but because the focus is at the wrong position. I am very sure the relatively heavy weight (compared to what I used before) of my rig helps here – the D300 weighs 800 grams, the lense about 1.5 kg which results in a steady 2.3 kg total weight including battery.

The whole episode lasted 5 minutes from the first photo to the last, and I really like the result. Those are quite substantial crops though, so no thought about printing here.

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The Bavarian Bird Conservation society LBV organizes once per year a winter “bird census” – everybody is invited to participate: Go out, and for one hour count the birds in your backyard, nearby park, inner city area.. and report the results back. They will publish the result of all this counting on January 20, and it will be interesting to see which birds make their way into this millenium and which struggle to survive. I do not know if there will be any concrete actions taken based on the result of the survey, but certainly it raises the awareness of what is going on in the bird populations around us.

Now, I have never participated in a bird census before and this sounded like a lot of fun, so I did a trial run yesterday (to do away this nervousness ), and did this morning my one hour count, already reported back to the Munich division of the LBV. They allow for doing this online now – smart move, avoids having to enter all the data manually by them…

The rules are actually simple: Take one hour, and count the birds you see. The only trick is to count per species only the birds you can see concurrently, in the same moment, so you don’t count the same individual twice (or more, given the speed the little critters dash around).

So here is my final count after this mornings nice but cold walk along the Isar river.

1. Blackbird – one. They actually don’t stay close to the river, but are found in the gardens next to it.
2. Great Spotted Woodpecker – one. There are plenty of them, I think, but you seldom see more than one at the same time (well, maybe it’s always the same )
3. Nuthatch – one.
4. Goldcrest – one. This I indentified only by it’s song – but that was rather easy as I had seen two of them (and heard) on my trial run yesterday at the same spot. Today I couldn’t see it, small as they are.
5. Grey Wagtail – one. I didn’t knew these were around in winter as well, but I had a very long and good look on this one, so I am sure it wasn’t a White Wagtail.
6. Short-toed Treecreepers – two. Actually I didn’t manage to measure it’s toe, but given the likeliness and the type of the habitat I vote for the short-toed version today.
7. Great Tits – Five. At least. And they were around everywhere. This bird also “won” the bird census last year, and I am sure it will win again. Amazing adaptability to our civilization.
8. Rooks – Two. Yesterday, there were at least one hundred flying south-west. I am sure it’s the cold that brings them down from the East. We had one of the coldest nights of the year yesterday, down to -12° centigrade. That’s about 10° F.
9. Wren – Two. I read those did leave Bavaria in the winter, back some 10 years ago. Now some of them stay. But why is it called “Winter Wren” then ?
10. Marsh Tits – Two. Well, that was a very quick encounter, and of course it could have been Willow Tits (or, given the dim light, Coal Tits). But reading the descriptions in my Svensson again, I vote for Marsh Tit having the highest likelihood.

Those were the birds officially listed on the survey’s check list. In addition, I could report

1. Little Grebe – Two.
2. Common Goldeneyes – Four.
3. Coots – 32! Gosh, this was the largest coot invasion I had seen so far on the river. They usually like to stay on the Kleinhesseloher Lake in the English Garden, but it seems as the water level in the Isar is as low as I have ever seen, they can find food now also in the very fast running river.

I didn’t report (because they didn’t ask for) the all too common (are they?)

1. Mute Swans – 6.
2. Mallards – 8.

Yesterday, but not today, I did see

1. Blue Tits – 2.
2. Mandarin Ducks – 16. This flock probably was more downriver today, but I didn’t get that far as my time was limited to the one hour.
3. Moorhen – 1. This was a first for me at least on the Isar river. It was quietly picking it’s way on the opposite shore, and seen by me only by coincidence as I counted the Mandarins – and arrived add an odd number, which is odd, because the always come in pairs So one of the female Mandarins actually was the Moorhen, as I found to my excitement recounting the ducks.
4. White-Throated Dipper – 1. Cool! This was the first Dipper I saw on the Isar within the city boundaries. The only one I had seen before was way downstream outside of the city. Back then, I actually was able to make a nice photo of him. Is this a success of the renaturation of the river as propagated by the Isar Alliance? Maybe, probably.


Now, today I didn’t take a camera with me because I wanted to do a good job counting – did I miss a photo opportunity? I don’t think so, as we had a grey overcast sky and the light was very dim. I have tried making photos on days like this before, but the pictures do lack color in the first place, in addition to having either a very high ISO (making the lack of color not better…) or blurred images due to long shutter speeds. I certainly didn’t miss a keeper today.

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