The lovely Puffin

 

Here comes the rest of the pictures from Skomer island and now it's time for the puffin, it's a sweet little bird.
As many of the sea birds they come in to the breeding grounds in the spring and then leave them when the kids have flown out of the nest usually in juli-august.
Then they spend the rest of the year out on the ocean in search of food. Oddly life but that the way it is, there are even more extreme birds doing so and that is the albatross they spend their first five years out on the the sea :)

Now, this morning, I will travel away again, and now it will be two weeks with my brother in Kalix, Sweden. We're also going to Finnmark for one week in northern Norway to fish for grayling, trout, and char. It'll be super nice and we hope for good weather and really good fishing.

This was my favorite picture from the trip

Fighting

Wide-angle at the Wick one of the Puffin places

Puffin in the underground nest hole

 

 

Chough

I have started to look through the pictures from  the Skomer island journey that was made recently, a fantastic little island with lots of birds.
The journey there was long, took us 6.5 hours but it was worth it, I really like that kind of places where you will be close to the bird / wildlife.
Skomer island can be reached by boat and as the boat out there is so popular and they take only 150 people there every day.
The first boat went off at 10 and then 11 and 12. Since I had read on the internet that the tickets could go very quickly to all three departing boats we were in place already 6:30 we stayed at a campsite nearby.
So at 10:15 we were on the island and got a  brief survey about the island of where we could find various bird sites and other info. Then me and my wife had until 15.00 on us to see and photograph what we wanted.
We first went to the center of the island which is not so big either it is about 2.5 km in diameter, so you can walk all around the island on 4-5hours but we decided to go to the middle and lower part where it was most birds .
In the middle of the island we had opportunity to see the little owl and short-eared owl, but unfortunately we only saw a short-eared owl in the distance, so we went on to puffins instead.
Another thing about the island is that it has holes in the ground everywhere, because many of the birds here make nests underground so you had to stick to the trails, it was otherwise a great risk of destroying nesting places.
We stayed for a while at the puffins place, they are so cute to look at especially when you can get so close to them, the trail went right through their settlements and we could almost touch them so close was they.
Photo wise it was lousy because it was bright sunshine.
If you want, you can stay overnight on the island but you have to book at least six months in advance because it is so popular. But then you have probably a better chance for good pictures and then you can even see the Manx shearwater because they only is coming in to land and their nests under the dark hours, but it should probably be a sight for this is the world's largest colony of  them, about 150000par.
I will first put out pictures of Chough which is also a special bird, found here on the island and around Wales and some parts of Ireland and England's shores.

Young Chough/Alpkråka wants food



On a walk

Finally some food

Not the best guality on this picture

Bank holiday Monday

On Monday (bank holiday here in UK) me and my wife went off for a 18km hike that began in Logde Moor and then towards Redmires Reservoirs and then a side trip to Stanage Edge and back.
The weather was fantastic, 17C and a lovely warm sun, and it seemed almost the whole of Sheffield was at Stanage Edge. I have never seen so many climbers there, like yesterday.

During the walk, we managed to see a bit more unusual birds as Dotterel, but I had only the wide angle lens on so there was no pictures taken. Another unusual bird, Ring Ouzel, I was looking for didn't make an appearance as there were so many climbers on their nesting place. There are signs saying you should avoid climbing at some spots, but people do not seem to care :((
The poor fellows are probably very stressed, but this amount of people is very very unusual.

Anyhow, I have swapped my old 10-24mm wide angle lens that I could only use on D90 (crop camera) to a 16-35mm f4 suitable for a the 3Ds (full frame), and I'm incredibly happy with it.
Have only had time to try it twice but compared to the last one this is So much better. This might be also due to a change to Nikon 3Ds which is a professional camera and can handle different lighting better.
So now I've completely switched over to full-frame and can avoid carrying two cameras with me.
Here you have some photos from Stanage Edge..

Trying to take off but a strong wind make him

to fly in to the stonewall, he was not injured :))