Going on a snowy walk

It snowed a couple of inches overnight, so before breakfast I went out in the garden to feed the birds. Mrs blackbird swooped down, first landing on top of the bird table roof, and then moving to the washing line, squawking like GIMME SOME FOOD!. I did throw some food towards her, but she wouldn't actually eat anything until I went back inside.

I put out some general bird seed, and also some mealworms and sultanas. I think the blackbirds prefer the mealworms and sultanas, while the sparrows prefer the seed.

The weather was sunny (well sunny and cloudy) this morning, so I went out on a walk. On part of the walk I saw there was a manure pile with lots of birds on it. There must have been about 20 robins, 5 dunnocks, and a few black birds.

I got as close as I could (it was on the other side of a fence. Unfortunately the longest lens I had with me was my canon 100mm macro, which was too short. So I didn't get any good photos, but I did enjoy watching the birds for a bit.

Just as I was taking a photo of a Robin, he jumped away. Despite the camera using a shutter speed of 1/400s, the Robin is still quite visibly blurred in the photo. So they must jump pretty fast. This is an extremely heavy crop:

This Robin (on the left) had an interesting breast, much whiter than the other Robins, and with dark streaks:

And here is a Dunnock:

The birds were eating insects from the manure. I did wait around for quite a while hoping that a bird would land on a post next to where I was standing, but they never got very near me. A 500mm lens might have been okay to get some reasonable shots.

In the afternoon I sorted and geo-coded the morning's photos.

In the evening I watched an episode of Star Trek Enterprise with Mauser and Bo. I read some photo websites and started processing one of today's panos.