Spring arrives

After a stormy but mild winter, spring is returning to the Lincolnshire Wolds. Today I went for a walk through Gunby Park and saw a robin hunting for its next meal.

I hadn’t been looking to do any wildlife photography. My attention was on the snowdrops bursting through the ground, and the warm sunshine painting light over the landscape, but as I stood on the edge of the cemetery I noticed a robin swoop between the branches of a thorn tree and alight, bobbing, on a fence post.

I’d fitted my vintage, manual-focus 200mm lens to my camera and was busy taking telephoto pictures. It just so happened that the lens was already set to the correct focus – no autofocus here – so I swung round and fired off a burst of shots as I watched the bird peering intently in the direction of the meadow.

Half a second after I captured the last picture in the sequence, the robin was gone and had snatched his prize from mid air. I’m very pleased with the image I managed to capture, and if you click through to the image on Flickr and zoom to full size you can actually see the fly in the left of the frame, just before it got grabbed by the robin.

It’ll be a while yet before the last of the cold weather is behind us, but this afternoon it felt like the first moments of spring had arrived in the Wolds.