But the sun was shining and as a result we decided to go to Bourton-on-the-water, a lovely little Cotswold's village, for the day. incidentally there is also a bird park with the only UK colony of king penguins and that was where we intended to spend most of the day.
My family went to walk round the village, but I decided to go straight into the bird park. I have foolishly left out the long tailed tit photos that I took of some stunning birds that were pretty close to me just outside the entrance to the bird park.
luckily, the first exhibit when you enter is the famous king penguins themselves and in the early morning sun and frost they looked pretty stunning. I cant remember how many there are but I seem to recall it being about 15. They share their exhibit with lots of humbolt penguins and although you can see humbolts anywhere they are still a very pretty bird.
Ha! two of them started having a scrap right in front of me. I was later told during the feeding talk that there was a very crabby penguin within the enclosure and so we can assume that he is the main subject in these photos
there are plenty of weird and exotic species here and i took photos of most of them and so I will only label the bird type because, after all, they are in cages and therefore have little story to tell about them!
seem to remember this bird being called a rosy starling, although its quite clearly not so I obviously remembered wrong!
azure winged blue pies! even in cages magpies are annoying to photograph!
Greater kiskadee
lilac breasted roller
hamerkop, nest building
crowned plover, in the desert house
Bali starling
Australian or possibly pink backed pelican
carmine bee eaters in the desert house
egyptian plover in the desert house
desert finch in (appropriately) the desert house
carmine bee eater, in the desert house!
in my opinion a smashing photo of a rhea, its my new desktop background!
African spoonbill in the big enclosure, which also, interestingly, contained eiders!
a kookaburra
a nasty owl (or burrowing owl if you so please)
some nice photos of king penguins
king penguins getting out of pool
humbolt penguins rushing to get into pool
humbolt penguin in pool
humbolt penguin out of pool, sleeping
The day passed uneventful but at night I noticed that the moon was red. I tried to get some photos of it but either the shutter speed was too low or the flash was wrong so they didn't really come out but see for yourself with what I got, a red moon curious
Good pictures.
ReplyDeleteThe moon was low in the sky at that time so the light has to come through a lot of atmosphere. The high frequency (short wavelength) light ie blues and greens gets dispersed more than the low frequency (longer wavelength) light ie red and yellow. The light reaching your eyer is richer in the red/yellow and the moon appears orange/red. If you keep watching the moon as it rises it gets progressively more yellow then eventually "white".
The moon also appears to get smaller as it rises in the sky. That's psychology and I don't do psychology.
OJC
cheers sir
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