We had a last minute opportunity to go out birding this afternoon and so, not to waste time planning, we plumped for WWT Slimbridge where we can generally count on seeing something interesting.
The first few hides didn’t produce anything very special (teal, lapwings and lots of greylag geese) but there was some excitement about a snipe which, however, was very difficult to see (with its head tucked in to its body).
Well camouflaged snipe
Teal
Lapwing
We then wandered through the captive watefowl where I took a few photos and we made our way to the Zeiss Hide.
Here we were richly rewarded as a crane flew right in front of us: this huge graceful bird made a very dramatic appearance and circled around before landing. I was busy trying to photograph it when spectacularly two more flew in front of us. We couldn’t believe our eyes when yet another two appeared.
They remained for a very short while before flying off over the reed beds towards the Severn estuary.
From the same hide we could also see more lapwing, a grey heron, redshank, several snipe and a greenshank (too far away for a photo).
Snipe
Redshank
Martin's Bird Blog & Nature Photos 