Staying (very) close to home for wildlife photography + dealing with winter blues
I have a constantly growing list of locations I hope to visit for my wildlife photography, and as much as I love to travel across the county and beyond, every now and then I am reminded of what I have when I simply step outside my back door. I am fortunate to live in a location that hosts a great variety of wildlife all year round, and I certainly don’t have to travel miles and miles away to find what is already so close to home!
I have an evergreen hedge that runs along the length of my back garden, and it is home to a healthy population of house sparrows. They wait eagerly at the top of the hedge as I put out the bird seed, and when their chicks leave the nest, I am delighted to watch the young bird being fed by the adults from my kitchen window. On a day last month when I didn’t plan to venture out anywhere, I decided to take my camera out in the garden to try and get some portrait shots of the sparrows, and to be honest with you, I really enjoyed photographing them! Because the sparrows were already used to my presence in the garden (whether I’m tending to the vegetable patch or topping up the bird feeder) I found myself getting relatively close to them without the need to use my pop-up hide. I used the evergreen hedge and trees in the background as a staple colour in the images. For these being one of the more unassuming bird species in the UK and Europe, they were certainly obliging!
As I said before, I enjoy travelling to locations away from home to find and photograph species not found locally — seals on the beach are a good example of this! But while I still hope to plan photography projects for certain species outside of my home county, I still intend to remind myself what wildlife I am already living alongside and consider photographing more of the common species that might go unnoticed by most people.
As the winter months bring in longer nights, and the weather becomes less and less favourable, I find it a struggle to stay motivated at this time of year for anything, not just for wildlife photography. Winter is a time of rest, when the trees lose their leaves and mammals like the hedgehog hibernate through to when Spring arrives. But to me, not everything in nature stops as the temperature falls. As food becomes scarce, the number of bird species visiting my feeder increases, along with more regular sightings of larger bird species including great spotted woodpeckers, jays, and the occasional sparrowhawk swooping through. As the larger bird species tend to be more wary around humans, I am tempted to set up my hide in my back garden and set up a natural feeding station away from the house to allow an opportunity to photograph the larger birds, like the jays. It’ll also give me the chance to plan out my own natural ‘studio’, so I can consider things such as where to place a natural perch and what the lighting situation will be like. By doing this, I’ll still be able to do wildlife photography during winter with hardly any travelling needed, while knowing that I won’t be too far from a hot cup of tea! There are also migrating bird species arriving on UK shores — anyone else seen the exciting numbers of waxwings already?! — that I would very much like to find heading into the new year. While I hope to continue looking out for the regular species and those visiting the UK from Northern Europe throughout winter, I am also going to take this time to recall and appreciate what I got to experience this year in terms of the wildlife I got to see and photograph. So, I am planning a YouTube video where I go through my favourite images of the year, and hopefully that will be available to watch in the next couple of weeks!
