I have been trying to take some pictures which are a bit different with, preferably, the birds away from the feeders in a more natural setting, which is of course much harder. The smaller birds especially do not hang around and pose nicely – they usually fly off the second you have established focus. These are the not very satisfactory results from the last few days, beginning with a Robin, above.
A change from the usual side-on position, this Blackbird looks quite feisty.
I am not at all happy with the sharpness of this (don’t zoom in) but it’s a start – my only other Woodpeckers have been on the feeders.
I find birds in flight very difficult and of course there is a very great deal wrong with this image, but the head is relatively sharp and the blurred wings and tail at least give a nice sense of motion.
Not much wrong with this and who can resist a Collared Dove?
Time for an etymology check – why “dove”? Doves and pigeons are the same thing, the words are interchangeable. No one is sure about the origin of the word, which appears in Early Middle English. Susan Myers, in her wonderful The Bird Name Book, Princeton University Press, 2022, gives two possibilities, neither of which does she find terribly convincing. One is that it is to do with diving, the other that it represents the way the bird sounds. All we can be sure of is that the original meaning of the word is lost.
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