adult ie 3cy+ male Honey-buzzard
Came across this bird on August 7th and then never saw it again until 19th when bizarrely it landed on the ground right out in the open in a harvested field - after about 15 minutes of picking around and some preening it calmly flew off - clearly need to give it some more effort next spring but only the second time I have seen one on the ground and the first was in September 1976! That bird was a juvenile excavating a wasp’s nest in Holkham Woods, Norfolk, and we saw it on two or three days during a weeks camping trip - on the latter day we thought it had gone as only the very tip of its tail was visible sticking out of the wasp’s nest hole it had dug - an amazing encounter but of course without the recourse of digital images or video of today.
A rather distinctive pale male Honey-buzzard with serious tail moult and new inner primaries
always quite distant and images confounded by heat haze on 7th
A priviledged view of a Honey-buzzard on the ground
Even at relatively close range, from the car, heat haze was still evident
The eyes are just amazing
Cloudy flatter light made for different maybe better images
When it took off it went sort of past me long enough to blast off a few images at 40fps
New growing inner primaries, central tail feathers and inner greater covert plus some scapulars and coverts
Impressive claws
Still debating on the Canon R5II but when I get a few decent shots with the R6II I am less inclined to spend more cash for more pixels
