I’ve just got back from a weekend in the Lake District where we were based at Bowness-on-Windemere, a small town on the edge of England’s largest lake – Lake Windemere. Each day I would visit the small beach area near the main jetty where the tourists boats set off on their trips around the lake. It’s a small shingly beach but it has a good selection of very tame birds including goosander, jackdaw, carrion crow, gulls and other waterfowl. The birds are fed by tourists and have become very habituated so it is very easy to get close to the goosanders in particular, usually a very wary bird.  On our arrival on Friday evening we happend to walk past here and there were up to 4 male goosander displaying to females at less than 2m from the bank! The light was dropping but was good enough for shots, but instead of nipping to the hotel and back for the camera, a journey of all of 10 minutes, I decided I do them first thing in the morning when the light would be better. Big mistake! The males never came back to that area though the females were there all the time.

The weather was very mixed with sunshine and heavy snow flurries on and off and a bitingly cold easterly wind. During one visit to the jetty, I was photographing lesser black-backed gulls on the mooring poists when, on removing my eye from the viewfinder, I spotted an Iceland gull perched right in front of me on the nearest post! It must have landed while I was photographing the gulls. Needless to say, I quickly switched my attention to that bird and got some nice images of him in a snow storm. Here are a few images from the trip