A Brit abroad

Black magic

Thanks to a hot tip from local birder and fellow digiscoper Olivier Laporte, I decided to take the train to the Bois de Vincennes to visit a tree which often holds a roosting Black Woodpecker in the winter. I found the tree without too much difficulty, and set my scope on a large, promising-looking hole. A flicker of movement caught my attention - could it already be in the hole? No, just a Starling prospecting nest sites. I wondered how the Black Woodpecker would react to this intrusion, Starlings being able to vigorously defend nest holes against much bigger birds. Was I going to dip because of a bloody Starling?

At least half an hour passed by, the monotony interrupted occasionally by passers-by wondering what I was looking at ("Il y a un pic qui aime dormir dans cet arbre"). Finally I see a large black bird with a deeply flapping flight heading right at me. Bingo! It landed on the tree a few feet down from the hole, and slightly obscured behind the trunk. I waited, finger poised on the shutter, for the bird to approach the hole. Nothing. I looked up from the camera and the bird had disappeared! I cautiously moved around the tree, to discover to my horror that I'd been watching the wrong bloody hole! Thinking I'd blown it, I nonetheless decided to set up my camera on the new hole in the remote hope that the woodpecker would reappear - and miracle of mircales, it did! Here are the sequence of shots I managed, over what seemed like an eternity but was probably no more than a minute. It then vanished back into the hole, and since the light was fading fast, I vanished too.

I went home and poured myself a generous glass of red wine. La vie est belle!

Posted by rjhall at February 16, 2006 9:05 AM