Quiver
After my trip around the The Baltics in April, May brought with it the promise of a change in pace and a bucket list photo opportunity with a trip to Wales and more importantly the island of Skomer, a small Island about one mile off the pembrokeshire coast filled with over 42000 breeding Puffins. After several years of cancelled trips to Lundy due to bad weather, and the dreaded covid, I was determined to finally get my chance to photograph these enigmatic little birds properly as they went about their breeding on the Island. Things didn’t bode well though when I heard the news that the wind on the day I arrived in Wales was too strong, meaning the boat to the island was cancelled. I had to wait nervously for the following morning to get news via twitter if the boats were going or not and my chance dashed again. Luckily my curse had lifted and the wind had died down overnight so the news was good! Below is a selection of my favorite photos from the trip so sit back, relax and enjoy this Puffin bonanza!
I realised quite quickly that these little birds are bursting with personality, constantly bobbing, preening, scuttling around and vanishing down their burrows, so getting some interesting shots were going to take some time and some patience.
I found photographing them in flight was almost impossible for my Fujifilm X-T4 to lock focus which was really frustrating so I began looking for isolated subjects to create some more interesting and dynamic images.
The one shot I was really searching for was a Puffin with a beak full of sand eels. Listening to a few people before the trip, it sounded like it was a little too early for them to be bringing them back, so I wasn’t getting my hopes up. But my luck was still holding when I saw some of the Puffins arriving back to their burrows with the sand eels in their beaks. The next challenge was to capture one stood still with them in its mouth…. This proved a real challenge as they come swooping in at speeds of up to 55 mph, diving straight into their burrows before being mobbed and their catch stolen by the local herring hulls. The key was finding one that overshot his target and had not been noticed by the ever present gulls. I managed to take the images below with the black cliffs behind making a low key image that I knew as soon as I took it that I had the image I had wanted in the bag!
After getting these images, any other ones were a bonus so I continued to look for ways to capture ‘different’ images of the birds. I found using the foliage and rocks that adorned the cliffs were the best ways to capture a more interesting shots, or wait for them to open their beaks rather than just image after image of them close up.
There were also other species of birds on the island to photograph with the Razorbill and swallows happily posing for me closer than I imagined I could ever get.
I even managed to get close enough to the noisiest bird on the Island, the breeding oystercatchers who used the thick foliage across the middle of the Island to rear their chicks.
overall a thoroughly successful day that will live long in the memory. For anyone who has not been here, I can’t speak highly enough of the experience, and would love to go back again, maybe slightly later to capture the Puffins bringing more sand eels in their beaks back their little pufflings waiting in their burrows.
As well as my trip to the Island, I also spend some time on the Pembrokeshire coast where I quickly realised this was going to be my best chance of photographing Red Kites which seemed to be found right across this whole area in large numbers. One such encounter happened above a small village so I jumped from the car and tried to capture the Kite as it spiralled above the rooftops. It was the closest I had been so took my chance, shooting at over 2000th of a second to capture the bird in flight.
Overall a perfect way to end the month of May, with Puffins and Red Kites ticked off the bucket list all in one trip. Next up more photo opportunities to be had when I make a return to Morocco and the city of Marrakesh at the start of June so watch this space….
FIN
