Young Lammergeiers at the Buseu feeding station in Catalonia (Mike Watson) CLICK IMAGES FOR LIGHTBOX
THE PEAK DISTRICT LAMMERGEIER got me thinking about my previous encounters with this special bird. I had struggled to see one for years, having missed it in Turkey, Israel and even Nepal until I finally caught up with one on its nest on a remote cliff face in the mountains of Lesotho of all places! After that distant encounter the floodgates opened when I started guiding Wild Images tours to Catalonia and, later, Ladakh to the point where I have been lucky to have enjoyed almost 100 sightings in all sorts of situations. The most thrilling of these were without a doubt from photo hides in the Pre-Pyrenees of Catalonia, arranged via Steve West of Birding in Spain at Buseu and Serra de Boumort. I had been thinking of going back to see the Peak District Lammergeier in the hope of a better photo but instead I decided to take a look through my archives at photos of young birds from Catalonia and reprocessed a few of them.
Check out that crazy red eyeliner! (Mike Watson)
OK images taken with the 1DIV almost 10 years ago are way noisier than the 1DX but I found a couple I like that I had forgotten about. My good friend Keith Regan had said something very honest to me in 2013, that he thought my photos were far too warm, like Kodacolour Gold back in the 80s. So nowadays I always check the auto WB recommendation in Lightroom when processing images. You might ask why not just have the camera set to auto WB? Well, I don’t bother what setting the camera is set on as it doesn’t really matter when I am going to check it in processing later anyway. With green backgrounds a colder WB is invariably needed to subdue it, as in the case at Buseu, where the feeding area and surrounding pine forest is very green. It also makes the vultures look less orangey and more sinister and I like that.
A dozen enormous tail feathers, like a third wing, make Lammergeiers very agile for such a big bird (Mike Watson)
It was also great to remember some of these majestic birds with full tails, albeit a bit ragged by late April, it is a shame that the current Peak District bird is missing its third wing or it would be even more impressive. Let’s hope that it stays long enough for it to grow back. I’m hoping that someone will set up a feeding station for it. Lambs legs go down very well! Sometimes two per sitting in my experience! Many thanks to my friends in Catalonia who made these photos possible, Steve West, Jordi Bas and especially Jordi Canut at Buseu, where these images were taken. I hope to return one day to this wonderful corner of the Iberian Peninsula.