Euroasian Dotterel, migrant photographed near Skjern in western Jutland on May 10th 2014.

The Eurasian Dotterel is a regular, if rare, visitor to the western parts of Denmark during a few weeks in early May each year. They have a number of fields pinpointed which they seem to frequent each year, but even so, finding them can be a challenge. Not only are they surprisingly hard to spot, they also move around between the few fields where they hang quite a lot.

Anyway; the Dotterels breed in remote locations in Norway and Sweden, where they don’t learn to fear humans much – so they are rather trusting little birds. In this case they allowed us to get close, as long as we were either creeping or crawling behind the big cameras/lenses. I must have shot a couple of hundred frames (as Christian says, you never know when you see one again) but only these few came out any good, a sign that I need to get to work microadjusting my new camera with the TC/500mm combo.

And speaking of microadjust (ma), it is far from the rocket science that some people will have you believe. In this link a fellow bird photographer named Arash Hazeghi outlines a very effective yet extremely quick’n easy way to do it, and I’ll be going through that procedure with my kit tomorrow.

The new EOS 1Ds mkiii is a joy to use – as soon as I have the focus sorted it’ll hopefully be the answer to my dreams (so far anyway). I sold my 5D mki and my 1D mkiii, so at this stage I actually only have one house, meaning it had better work!

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