Heron Stalking

On Tuesday I went for a walk at Cors Caron. This is a lovely nature reserve which is “an untamed mix of raised bog, reedbed, wet grassland, ponds, streams and patches of woodland”. In the summer it will be teeming with Dragonflies and Damselflies, as well as Common Lizards and the occasional Adder (if you’re lucky). You can see more of my posts about Cors Caron here: more posts. At this time of year it’s a bit quieter. It was a sunny day but with a cold wind, and it was a lovely peaceful walk. The boardwalk at Cors Caron is excellent if you have back pain as it’s so flat there are no issues with lumps and bumps jarring your back, and it’s suitable for wheelchairs so is accessible to all.

So as there wasn’t much chance of Dragonflies I was looking out for birds and spotted some Mallard Ducks, a Canada Goose, a Reed Bunting, Red Kites and a Heron. More about the Heron in a moment …

There were many other birds around – I could hear them! But they were not easy to spot so I didn’t get any more photos of different species.

Back to the Heron. I was strolling back towards the car park when a Heron suddenly took off in front of me! I tried to get a shot and managed one half-decent photo where you can actually see it’s a Heron:

It then decided to taunt me, so I attempted to stalk it. It flew back down the other end of a large pond so I tried to creep up on it. I got this shot from quite a distance – can you spot it?!

Sadly as I got closer it spooked and flew further away over the boardwalk (you can just see it – the horizontal line half way up the image) into the pond beyond. So I kept on creeping towards it even though I was going away from the car park again (and the toilets!). As you can probably guess, as I got nearly close enough, off it went again, and this time far away from the boardwalk where I couldn’t even attempt to get close. So I gave up and retraced my steps again towards the car park.

The Heron then seemed to take pity on me a little and did an impressive goodbye fly-by right over my head!

Finally, just to prove I do occasionally take my macro lens off my camera, here are some ‘establishing shots’ of Cors Caron. Hopefully you can sense the peace and tranquility from them.

Mainly inspired by an elusive Heron, but also by the Weekly Photo Challenge: Landscape.