Of Hoopoes and holes

Working with wild animals, one thing that you soon learn  is that they won't quite do what you want them to.  A family of Hoopoes that I've  photographed for the last couple of years in Koros-Maros National Park, Hungary were no exception to this.

I've been told that the most important consideration when choosing a new home is location, location, location! Sadly, nobody had explained this to the Hoopoes. Eschewing various scenic nesting sites, they had decided to make their home in a secure but decidedly unattractive metal oil drum on a disused airfield. You can see the problem from an image taken last year below...

Photographing the birds at the nest hole was a  a bit disappointing as it's not very tree like. So, in circumstances like these, when the bird won't come to the tree then this year I brought  the tree to the bird. 

The nearby forests have plenty of fallen trees with peeling bark, so I collected a good amount of this. The bark was then screwed onto a wooden frame in which there was a gap for the nest hole. This fake tree should be put in place early in the season, preferably before the birds have nested - Hoopoes had been nesting in the oil drum for several seasons so it was likely that they'd use it again this year, which proved to be the case.

I used a hide set up nearby to photograph the birds at their fake tree and managed to get plenty of photos of them at the hole - the fact that their oil drum had sprouted a bark-covered trunk didn't seem to bother them in the slightest. In fact, they got the best of both worlds - a camouflaged wooden  façade and a predator-proof steel nest.

Just another day at the office?

One of the best things about being a wildlife photographer is the office environment. My daily commute is generally to somewhere outdoors, and the location changes frequently. One week you might be wading through a marsh in Hungary en route to a floating hide, the next up a tree in Wales lying in wait for Kestrels. True, I often have alarmingly early starts or late finishes but the same thing could be said for many of my friends working in more sensible jobs in the city.

Last week, the ‘office’ was the island of Texel in the North Sea, a few miles off the Dutch coast. Texel is renowned for its diverse and numerous bird population which includes large breeding colonies of hard-to-find waders, raptors such as the Hen Harrier and Rough-legged Buzzard, and many exotic species that make landfall on the island during their annual migration. The varied landscape of dunes, beaches, farmland and an extensive network of channels and dykes make it an ideal place for photography. It’s also a popular destination for many Dutch holiday makers in summer so there’s a good choice of hotels and excellent restaurants to recover in after a day’s filming. It’s a nice location and, when the weather is as good at it was last week, it’s hard to think of many better workplace.

The office dress code is a little unconventional by most people’s standards: water-proof trousers, gloves, balaclava and generously cut camouflage netting. All designed to make it a tiny bit easier to get close to the quarry. You get used to it after a while – after all, it’s just a uniform in the same way that a  business suit is, and a little more comfortable if I’m honest as you don’t have to wear a tie. I’ve learned through experience  that it’s usually best to remove the balaclava and webbing before leaving the field (something I’ve been careful to do since the unfortunate screaming incident of 2012...).

As is often the way, my working week was a mix of great (finding the Bluethroat pictured at the top of the page and managing to get close enough for a decent shot), mundane (many hours spent waiting for things to show up) and the odd disappointment (I was about a week too early to catch the Avocets nesting).

So that was my office last week. This week it’s the River Thames in London and the Essex marshes. Next week, it’s the Carpathian Mountains (in search of Brown Bears, in case you were wondering). It would be the perfect working environment, if only the coffee facilities were better...